


the gory truth of it

by goodmourningdove



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Character Study, Coming Out, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, M/M, Overthinking, Recovery, watch a marriage disintegrate before your very eyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21785809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodmourningdove/pseuds/goodmourningdove
Summary: You wouldn’t think that there’s a lot of time for inner reflection when you’re bleeding out, but there is. In fact, there’s little else to do after you’ve given up on holding your own insides inside but tell yourself that if you live, you’ll actually live this time and that the echoed chanting of “clown, clown, clown, clown” had better not be the last thing you ever hear.After narrowly avoiding death, Eddie learns that the hardest promises to keep are the ones you make to yourself. An un-tragedy in three acts.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 76
Kudos: 368





	1. Act 1: The Fall

**Author's Note:**

> general sort of tw/cw for descriptions of injury, mentions of canon suicide, and emetophobia

The thing they don’t tell you about near death experiences is that, when you’re really deep in, when you’re tightrope-walking heel-toe-heel-toe that hair thin line between “near” and “actual,” you make a lot of promises. There’s the typical, “please, god, let me live” variety, the “I promise to be a better man” type. Just pitching your life to whatever powers may be (at that point, you’re generally hoping that they _be_ ) and praying something takes pity on you over it. Those promises come first. But after that, if you’re still holding on after the pleading and the begging and the bargaining, you start making promises to yourself and yourself alone.

You’re all you’ve got, there in the end; if there’s anytime to be selfish it’s when you can feel time, and your own blood, slipping through your fingers. When you get lightheaded, just before that true, last “here I go” feeling, not unfamiliar from a lifetime of dizzy spells but stronger and deeper than ever before, as what is still (for now) you gears up for the big final faint, that’s when it happens.

That’s when it comes out, the vows, that if you somehow get through this you will grasp for that blessed second chance with both hands, you’ll grip it so tight your fingernails crack and your joints ache, and you won’t ever let go. You’ll live for yourself for once, and stop tying yourself down to something that’s, metaphorically, hurt and dying. You get a lot of perspective on stuff like that when you’re literally hurt and dying.

You wouldn’t think there’s a lot of time for inner reflection when you’re bleeding out on a filthy floor, cold and clammy from both the loss of blood and the general musk of a cistern, laying back, just kicking it to the soundtrack of the people you love most in the world bullying a clown to death. But there is. In fact, there’s little else to do after you’ve given up on holding your own insides inside but tell yourself that if you live, you’ll actually _live_ this time and that the echoed chanting of “clown, clown, clown, clown” had better fucking not be the last thing you ever hear.

* * *

Eddie died.

Eddie died three times. Once in the ambulance and twice on the operating table. 

It didn’t stick.

He’d almost died a fourth time, of a fucking heart attack, after his attending physician informed him about his close calls not even an hour after waking up. This hospital, he had decided, was going to get a _nasty_ review as soon as he got his phone back on him. As soon as he could think clearly and everything didn’t hurt so fucking bad.

The days after his “little accident” passed in a blur of painkillers, bandages, and sporadic tears. Some from himself, more from his friends and from Myra over the phone, and many, overwhelmingly, from Richie, who (and this may just be as a result of his clown-fucked memory) he could previously count on one hand the number of times he’d seen cry. Now, however, from the time Eddie came to, he’d been hard pressed to spend an hour with Richie that didn’t, at least once, end with him crying. And he spent a lot of hours with Richie those days in the hospital. Richie set up camp in that little plastic chair next to Eddie’s hospital bed, sitting silent vigil, and then, later, not-so-silent vigil, morning, noon, and night for days on end. 

And then, just like that, he was gone. “Dates in Reno,” he had said, although, when Eddie googled his tour, they’d been cancelled. His next shows were in Laughlin, which was a fucking _stretch._ Eddie would have liked to have ragged on him about this, about still lying to show off at forty years old (as much as “ _shows in Reno”_ was showing off) but Richie was now a dust cloud pointed towards Nevada and Eddie had put very strict restrictions on his own unsupervised phone use until his doctor toned down the cocktail of painkillers he was on.

So, his days shifted from being blurry with Richie to being blurry sans Richie and before he really knew what was happening, he was sat in the passenger seat of Mike’s truck with a bottle of painkillers (with which he was to be very careful), a cane (because you just don’t survive taking a clown claw through your midsection without at least some of your shit getting forever fucked), and a plane ticket home.

He still wasn’t good to drive and the jury was still out on whether or not he ever would be again. His doctor at the hospital had given him a referral to a physical therapist back in New York, and Eddie spent most of the flight mentally penciling in new appointments amongst his likely majorly fucked schedule. 

He found himself in the lobby of his apartment building—waiting for the elevator and frustrated the stairs weren’t an option—and realized that he barely even knew how he got there. 

Well, he knew how he got there, obviously. He never would have left the hospital if he had any suspicion that there was something wrong with his memory. And, while he’d been skewered and drained of a near-unsurvivable quantity of blood, he’d somehow made it out of Neibolt without a concussion. Which was some small comfort amidst the general terror over what was going on with the rest of his body. But, still, it felt like he was on a conveyor belt hauling him ever forward while everything just sort of happened to and around him until he was promptly mailed flat-rate right back into his old life, wrapped up nice and neat. If that made any sense. He’d been very cautious with the painkillers but that metaphor got away from him there. 

He was brought out of his pseudo-stupor by the dinging of the elevator reaching the ground floor and sliding open to him. He just stood there, cane in one hand and roller suitcase in the other, staring into the open elevator as it waited for him to board and push the button sending him upwards toward what was and has been his life. Derry was a pause on that. A longer than anticipated and painful pause, but, still, only a pause. Life-altering, definitely, but not necessarily life-changing. He stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for his floor.

The thing they don’t tell you about the promises you make to yourself? They are very, very hard to keep. 

* * *

He’d been home for a week and was pretty sure he’d got himself back into the swing of things. With _alterations_ of course, like the dent in his torso (which Richie had christened “The Cupholder,” during one of those pleasantly blurry hospital days), and the cane, and the fact that he had _friends now_ (again?). 

He could tell that last one was worrying Myra. He knew by the way she would look at him from across the living room, or the dining table, or their bed (the two or three nights a week they actually shared one; the counselor, no, not the first one, but the second one, had said it was healthy, actually), as he tapped away on his phone to chime in to the group chat Mike had set them all up with, or to text back Richie or any of the others who messaged him personally.

The injury had worried Myra too, of course, that was to be expected. But, even with his half-baked excuse as to what almost got him killed (horrible, freak accident with a house demolition and flying debris, massive OSHA violation; he knew she didn’t believe him but he also knew she wouldn’t say anything about it), it was still the sudden appearance of friends that seemed to perplex her the most.

“Eddie, honey,” she said, on his eighth day back home. She sat across from him at their cute, little breakfast nook in their cute, little kitchen, in their cute, not-so-little apartment in not-little-at-all New York City, a coffee in front of her (decaf, black, four sugars) and half an orange in front of him (grapefruit would have been preferred, but he’d never been one to fuck around with medication reactions). “Who are you texting?” she asked, benignly.

“Hm?” he jumped in his seat, looking up at her, fingers bumping and prematurely sending out his response chastising (bitching at) Richie for still being up when it’s four in the morning in Los Angeles. “Oh, just some old friends,” he started to explain, feeling strangely guilty, like he’d been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. Fucking ridiculous. “From growing up. We all reconnected when I went home,” he said, then added, “For Stanley’s funeral.” That was the excuse they had all agreed on, quarter-truth as it may be. In any case, “had to take off out of nowhere to reenact _The Big Chill_ ” was much easier to swallow than “had to follow through with a childhood promise to re-kill a space clown.” He also wasn’t sure if Myra believed this part of it either, but, again, knew she wouldn't bring it up. 

“Right, of course. I’d forgotten,” she said, sounding like she hadn’t forgotten at all.

He typed out the rest of his message to Richie in a second text and sent it off, before setting his phone on the table, face-down, and looking up at his wife, only to find her gazing downward into her coffee cup.

“Myra? You alright?” She raised her head back up.

“Oh, sorry. I’m just a little tired, I think. I might be coming down with a cold,” she said. “Don’t forget to take your vitamin C supplement, I don’t want you to catch it.” He nodded at her and turned his attention back to his breakfast, carefully removing the rest of the orange peel, separating it into slices.

“I love you,” softly, Myra said, watching him from across the table. He glanced back up to her.

“I love you too, sweetheart.” The term of endearment was more of a habit than anything at this point, but it seemed to appease her, relief painted across her features. 

He smiled at her. She smiled back. 

His phone buzzed, and he looked away to pick it back up.

* * *

“Hey, Kaspbrak.” Eddie looked up from his computer to the man standing stiffly in the door of his office, hands in his pockets.

“Yeah?” He saved the spreadsheet he’d been fixing three times before minimizing the window and looking back up at Craig Green, fellow risk analyst and vague superior to himself. A few months ago, Eddie would have said they were friends, until he remembered what that word actually meant. Now he was just someone Eddie happened to see a lot. 

“The missus and I were talking,” Craig started. He was the type of guy who said things like “the missus” and always called people by their last names like he’d never quite got over playing football in high school. Eddie hated it. Growing up, a call of his last name was generally followed by a rock at his head, and he’d never been one for team sports. Barring six notable exceptions, he’d never managed well when working with others. Even then, as kids, his friends had almost never wasted their time playing team sports when all games ended with Richie and Eddie tackling each other into the grass, dirt, or even, occasionally, the asphalt. A complete game of kickball just wasn’t realistic when Bill and Mike had to drop everything to drag Eddie away from trying to shove fistfulls of grass in Richie’s mouth as Beverly cheered them on, while Stan wandered off with his binoculars and Ben looked on, worried. Still fun, of course, if unusual. Which was on-brand for the seven of them.

Eddie’s sudden, warm memories of grass stains and skinned knees was interrupted when Craig continued:

“We were thinking, it’s been a while since we did a double-date night. Grace’s been wanting to catch back up with Myra and we haven’t all got together since you, since you,” Eddie guessed that Craig didn’t know how to end that sentence in any way other than “almost fucking died” and Eddie didn’t want to get into it, so he cut him off.

“Right, yeah, it’s been a while,” he said. “I’ll talk to Myra about it. I’ll, um, we’ll let you know.” The pronoun felt weird in his mouth. He and Myra had been a “we” for well over a decade, and he’d referred to them as such hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It felt unfamiliar now and his stomach churned at it. It was doing that a lot lately. (Indigestion, maybe? Acid reflux? He’d never had too much trouble with heartburn, healthy eating assured that, but it could be something else, like, if the, the, the, IT injured his stomach on the way through. His doctor told him that nothing had happened to his stomach, but that didn’t mean he was _right._ A doctor, sure, but a doctor at _Derry General,_ plus, doctors make mistakes all the time, they get complacent in their knowledge and Eddie had never been complacent in any, any, any—) 

Craig chatted at him for a few more minutes, expertly missing or ignoring all hints Eddie sent his way about wanting to get back to work. It came to a blessed end, eventually, but not until Craig suggested that Eddie join his _fucking handball league_ and Eddie had to gesture with his head to his cane, leaning up against the side of his desk. Things got (more) uncomfortable at that point until Craig finally fucked off back to his own office, reminding Eddie about the potential double date _again_ , before leaving.

He ran a few more equations through his spreadsheet, giving less and less of a shit about this merger he was helping facilitate with every key he pressed. He’d been just about to say “fuck it” and take lunch at 10:30 when his cellphone (which he, until recently, had always kept turned off and inside his briefcase during the workday) buzzed from its spot on his desk, alerting him to a call. He picked up,

“Richie?”

“Eds! Hey, what’s up?”

“What’s up? You called me.” Eddie rolled his chair across the easy-scoot plastic rug under his desk, grabbing his cane and rising to shut the door to his office. “The fuck are you doing up?” he asked. “It’s, like, 7:30 there, isn’t it?”

“Au contraire, mon petit ami,” Richie said, then coughed. “Um, I mean, I’m in an airport, so time doesn’t exist for me anymore. I just drank a Bloody Mary with a Cinnabon, I am not bound to the hands of the clock.”

“Christ, what a heinous combination, Rich, that’d legitimately taste like vomit.” He made his way back into his desk chair, sitting down and idly twisting it back and forth as he spoke.

“Breakfast of champions, actually. It’s got all the food groups: vegetables, vodka, icing that’s the exact consistency of jizz.”

“Oh, gross, knock it off.”

“It’s protein, Eds, grow up.” 

“It’s pure sugar.”

“I was talking about—”

“I know what you were talking about and I’m not discussing,” even though the door to his office was closed, he lowered his voice to a whisper, “ _semen_ with you. I’m at work.” 

“Oh, yuck, it sounds all Law-and-Order-y when you call it that. Jizz is something you can joke about being on a cinnamon roll, semen is what you find on, like, a corpse.”

“And a real great conversation topic for an airport. Where are you, LAX?”

“Nah, ATL, baby. Layover,” he explained. “I, um, kind of wish it was longer, I thought I might try and give Patricia a visit one of these days. Check in, y’know?”.

“Yeah, I know.” They fall quiet, wordlessly slipping into a moment of silence for Stan. They hadn’t talked about the letters, not in detail, not to each other. Eddie couldn’t stop reading his over and over, like if he went through it enough times he’d be able to actually make sense of it outside of it being a collection of vaguely comforting words that did little else than make him sad and nauseous. “Anyway, layover? Where’re you headed? Still on tour?” He could hear Richie slap his forehead on the other end of the line.

“Right, shit, that’s why I called. Yeah, I’m actually, I got shows in New York this weekend.”

“Oh, shit, really?”

“Yeah, man, if you’d follow me back on Twitter you’d already know, but, um. If you wanna, I can comp you some tickets if you and the, uh, the wifey want to come. And,” he added, “I’m there for a few days, so maybe we can get drinks or something. Show me all the cool places credit reporters hang out.”

“That’s not my job. That’s not even _a_ job.” Eddie was fiddling on his computer, dragging the cursor into selection boxes across the desktop, grinning as he fell into the easy pattern of bickering with Richie.

“Sure, sure, talk down to all those hard working credit reporters out there, crunching the numbers you’re too good to crunch.”

“Credit reporters are _programs_ , it’s not something that people do.”

“Dehumanizing them too? You’re one heartless motherfucker, Kaspbrak.” Richie calling him by his surname never had the same effect as other people doing it, if only because anytime Eddie was getting rocks thrown at him, Richie was usually getting rocks thrown at himself too. Eddie almost liked it, as much as he almost liked a lot of the more annoying things about Richie. Richie cackled at his own joke, pleased with himself and making Eddie very happy that Richie couldn’t see him smiling. 

“But, um,” Richie said, once he got his self-induced laughter under control, “you’ll try to come?” Richie was a loudmouth at the best of times, so Eddie was weirded out over just how small his voice sounded. After only a moment’s hesitation, he answered:

“Yeah, man, of course. I’ll have to, I mean, I’ll ask Myra. I don’t think she’d want to come but—”

“It’s fine if you can’t make it. I’m not gonna cry if you don’t show up.”

“But,” he continued, “I’ll be there.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah, Richie, I’ll be there.”

* * *

Myra, it turned out, wanted to come to the show.

Of course she wanted to go with him, she had said. She wanted a chance to meet one of Eddie’s “new friends.”

“Old friend,” he corrected her and she’d nodded.

“Right, of course,” she’d said, and suggested that maybe his dear, old friend could get tickets for the Greens as well, it had been so long since we’d all got together, hadn’t it?

Richie was more than happy to hand over the tickets and Eddie hated it. He hated that he’d even asked Myra, but he felt like he should, for the sake of transparency, because he’d done a pretty shitbag job of being a husband lately, with all the “running off out of nowhere to meet with friends he’d never mentioned before” and the “coming home with two new holes in his body.”

And maybe it was unfair, but he hated that too, how worried she would get, even (and maybe even especially) when it was actually warranted. And maybe it was unfair, but he hated sitting in the theater, squeezed between Myra and a stranger (who was _exactly_ the kind of person he would have expected to be at one of Richie’s shows) so she could sit next to and catch up with Grace Green. And maybe it was unfair, but he hated Richie’s stupid show, watching him up on stage, carefully charismatic and phony as hell, easing through jokes Eddie knew he hadn’t written. 

Although he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, or track down the specifics, Eddie couldn’t help but feel that enough of his life had been un-fucking-fair that he could be a little unfair right back. Even it it was, well, unfair.

Eddie told Richie what he’d thought about the show, afterwards, after the Greens had peeled off to collect their kids from the sitter and he made his way to the stage door, not checking if Myra was following him or not. He stood back and waited for the smattering of fans to fuck off before going up to Richie and laying into him, giving his scathing, but detailed, impromptu review while Richie led him back inside into the greenroom.

“Fuck, Eds, don’t sugar coat it or anything,” Richie said, feigned offense like a patchy layer of spackling over what Eddie could only call exhaustion.

“It’s just— it’s just fake as fuck, man,” Eddie said. “I mean, you’ve never been funny, but you were always _you_ at least.” Richie raised his eyebrows at him, visibly tired, but smirking.

“Hell yeah, I knew you’d have notes. Tell it to me straight, Eddie, baby,” he said and threw open his arms. He held them open, looking at Eddie (who had roughly fifty different things on his mind at all times, but especially now, standing in front of Richie like it was something they just got to _do_ now) expectantly, tired smile still stretched across his face. 

“What?” Eddie asked. Richie huffed, and waved his arms.

“I’m trying to initiate a hug, dipshit, it’s something friends do when they haven’t seen each other for weeks.” 

“Oh. Well.” Eddie rolled his eyes and stepped into Richie’s arms, wrapping his own arms around him as he went. Eddie felt Richie tentatively place his arms around Eddie’s back, avoiding the still painful wound, landing with one arm around his lower waist and his other hand cradling the back of his head, gentle in a way he didn’t know Richie could be. It was fucking _weird._

Eddie tightened his grip around Richie’s back, urging him to hug like he fucking _meant it._ Richie took the hint and squeezed harder before pulling back to look at him.

“You’d think you missed me or something.”

“Shut up.”

“Eddie, honey?” Eddie swung around at the sound of Myra’s voice, finding her peeking into the greenroom. “The, um, stage manager said, said that you…” she trailed off. Richie pulled his arms off of Eddie and back to his sides, like Eddie was a hot stovetop and Richie was some dumbass kid who just had to touch things. Which.

“I’m right here, Myra,” he said, and then tacked on, “sweetie.” 

“I got worried,” she said, “you ran off so fast, and you know moving too quick can strain your back and you trip so easily with the, with the cane, and the doctor said—”

“I know what the doctor said. I was there,” Eddie said. Again, she was worried and he hated it. He loved her, he did, he did, but he hated it. 

Richie cleared his throat behind Eddie, drawing attention to himself. He raised a hand in a stiff, but still sort of goofy (everything was always kind of goofy when ran through the filter of his gangly body, it was— it was _something_ ) gesture.

“Hey,” he greeted, crossing the room with his arm outstretched for a handshake Myra hesitated to accept. “Myra Kaspbrak, I presume,” he said, dusting off the British Guy voice, which had only grown more van Dyke-esque with age. Voice aside, Richie introduced himself to her like a normal fucking adult. “Richard Tozier. Eddie and me, we, uh, we grew up together. Glad to finally meet you, Mrs. K, Eds has told me so much.” 

It was bullshit. Of course. It was all bullshit. Bullshit because Eddie knew he’d barely breathed a word about Myra to Richie, outside of her general existence as his wife. Beyond that, it was bullshit that Richie could say otherwise and still have it come off as genuine. 

“Just,” Myra stuttered, “just Myra is fine.”

“Oh, okay,” Richie said, dropping her hand. “No problem.” Eddie knew, he _knew_ there would be no stopping Richie continuing to call her Mrs. K. Eddie had already heard Richie’s “tight two” on how Eddie’s wife was a “carbon copy” of his mother after, reluctantly, showing off his wedding photos at the Chinese restaurant that first night back in Derry.

“Fucking shit,” Richie had said, drunk already from handlessly downing shots in a way that made Eddie’s hands itch, presumably out of an urge to strangle. “You know you’re supposed to be, like, fuckin’ happy when you get married, right? Like you knew that? You look like you just watched your dog get blue-needled _and_ you had food poisoning.” 

“That’s enough, Rich,” Eddie said, trying and failing to focus on the plate of orange chicken in front of him. Richie either didn’t hear him, or, more believably, didn’t give a shit, and continued:

“No, really, look.” He had already taken Eddie’s phone out of his hand, and now shoved it back in his face, pointing. “Look at your face, you look like you gave your vows mid pants-shitting.”

Luckily (?), shit broke real bad with the fortune cookie incident right after that, so Eddie didn’t have a chance to fight with Richie over his “brilliant observations.”

But, now, months later, watching Richie interact so cordially with Myra (which was un-fucking-settling, like, yeah, there was a decades-spanning gap he couldn’t account for in there, but he’d never, in his _life_ , seen Richie do anything that could be called “cordial,” it was uncanny), drove him up a fucking wall. Not that he wanted Richie to be rude to his wife or anything, but. But. But.

But what? 

But _what?_

He didn’t know. Or, he didn’t think he knew. After everything with the Derry “reunion,” it had become pretty safe to say that Eddie had no idea what he did or didn’t know, and, like seemingly everything these days, it drove him up a fucking wall. 

All he knew was that watching them interact was, was, _uncanny_. It just plain felt wrong to look at, like completely different zones of his life colliding against his will and better judgement. Some “never the twain shall meet” type shit or something, like Richie and Myra were supposed to exist on separate planes. It just felt incorrect.

“Sweetheart,” Eddie said, drawing both Myra and Richie’s attention back to him. “Rich and I were going to go out, catch up a bit. You alright to drive back by yourself?” She’d driven them there. Eddie’s physical therapist, real mensch that he was (outside of costing a fucking fortune), had told him that, while the cane might be a permanent fixture, his chances of driving again were high. That did mean that, for the time being, Eddie relied pretty heavily on ride shares and Myra carting him around in the Cadillac that Mike was kind enough to drive down to New York and deliver to Eddie, fucked up passenger door and all. Public transport was an option, but the MTA was a petri dish at the best of times and if he didn’t want to put himself through a chemical shower before he even entered his apartment, he wouldn’t bother with it.

Myra, whose face revealed emotions so plainly and so clearly that she might as well have spoken them aloud, looked disappointed, but said:

“Oh, right. Yes, yes, that’s fine, Eddie-bear,” she slid around Richie to kiss Eddie on the cheek. “Have fun with your friend. Let me know when you get home.”

“Don’t wait up,” Eddie said, almost calling after her as she left the room to make sure she heard. She walked out the door without turning around, the door shutting behind her.

“Whelp,” Richie said, after a few seconds of silence. “Where to, Eddie-bear?”

* * *

Richie, it had turned out, knew more bars in Manhattan than Eddie did. Significantly more. Richie told him that was both a “tragedy” and “stupid” since he wasn’t even the one who “fucking lives here, Eds, that the hell?”

Richie took it upon himself to remedy this and Eddie could only assume it was out of the psychosexual thrill Richie must have got out of forcing chaos into the lives of otherwise decent people.

Eddie had said this to him during their walk (Richie had said it wasn’t far, but it felt pretty fucking far and his back twinged from it) from bar two to three. Something about the chuckle Richie gave in response made Eddie’s stomach burn.

“Only yours,” Richie said, glancing back at him. “I’m righting a wrong here. This next place is really sweet.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. How do you know so many places around here? You said you never lived here, right?”

“Nope, my heart belongs jointly to LA and Chicago, and I’ve always been faithful to our threesome,” he joked, before continuing. “But, uh, nah, I’ve never lived here. But, I’m here a lot for shows and I had an, um, ex who used to live in Tribeca, so I know my way around, I know the _cool_ places.”

“Pfft, the ‘cool places?’”

“Yes or no, were the places I just took you cool as shit or not?” Eddie didn’t know if there was an objective answer to that. Eddie didn’t know what was “cool” or not, never had, and kind of doubted Richie did either. But he was enjoying himself. 

“Also, Tribeca? She had to be rich as _shit,”_ Eddie said, nudging at Richie’s shoulder with his as they made their way down the sidewalk. Richie didn’t shove back, but chuckled and said, “Yeah, man.” 

The next bar had been pretty nice, with lots of dark wood and cozy lighting, busy but not loud. Lively, but he could still hear Richie when he leaned in to talk to him in the corner booth they’d snagged. 

“How’s the tour going?”

“How’s it going? You told me it sucked, man. Did you forget already?”

“No, I mean, I have, like, taste, but what about your _audience_ audience.”

“Well,” he said, laughing, “after my little—my manager keeps calling it a fucking ‘hiccup,’ it’s hilarious—in Chicago, and then falling off face of the planet for like a month, that all drummed up a lot of “intrigue” so it’s actually gone way smoother than I thought. Super weird,” he explained. “Although, I think honestly people are just jumping at the bit to see if I freak out again.” He shrugged. “We might try and swing back around and do Chicago again. The Chicago Theatre’s still pissed at me, I’m super not ‘welcomed back,’ but the Thalia might make a deal with me for a way smaller crowd. Which, like, take what you can get, right?”

Eddie had been just about to say something to that, although he wasn’t sure exactly what (Intrigue? Was that all? Did Richie _think_ he was going to have another freak out? There had to be something to work with here, come on, Kaspbrak, get your shit together), when he was interrupted by someone coming up to their table.

“Richard fucking Tozier, is that you?” Both Eddie and Richie looked up at the man now standing before them, his arms stretched out. Eddie had just been about to ask, “yeah, man, what of it?” when Richie responded.

“Oh, shit! Chris? What the fuck is up? What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? I live here, bitch.”

“No way, I heard you moved to Boston?”

“I did! But you know there’s no keeping me out of New York Shitty for long,” Chris (apparently) said, and Eddie felt weird over it. Who was this guy? At risk of sounding like a needy toddler, this was Richie-and-Eddie time and this guy was really harshing on that motherfucking _vibe_. 

The Chris guy, Eddie thought, admittedly bitchily, was real fucking annoying. Eddie watched Chris look him up and down, smirking, which made Eddie’s skin feel like crawling right off his body. 

“Wow, Rich, this your new—” Chris had said, until Richie cut him off.

“No, nope,” Richie said. “He’s an old friend. We grew up together.” Richie then gestures between them, “Chris this is Eddie, Eddie this is Chris,” he introduced. “Whelp, Chris, it was super cool to see you, but we were kind of, y’know?” Richie was obviously dropping some kind of hint, but Eddie, and this annoyed him, didn’t know what it was, exactly (it was a hint to leave, obviously, but there was something else there that Eddie didn’t get and it made him uncomfortable which pissed him right off).

Chris, taking the hint, _whatever it was_ , nodded and wished them a good evening before taking off back towards the bar. 

Eddie had asked, not long after, what that was all about. He watched as Richie got kind of weird, kind of twitchy at his spot across the table. 

“That was,” he said, and paused, frowning, “not how I wanted to do this.” Eddie didn’t know what that meant, so he just looked up at him, waiting for Richie to continue. Richie sighed.

“That,” he began again, “was the, uh, was the ex I was telling you about. He showed me this place, _god,_ years ago? Fuck, I heard he moved to Boston so I didn’t expect to, like, _see_ him, let alone have him come up to us. Right? I mean, you’d think once you leave New York, that’s, like, a _for good_ kind of decision, right?”

Richie was doing that thing. He was doing that thing he does when he was nervous and just kept talking, and talking, and talking like he hoped the person he was talking at would walk away, or change the subject, or just forget what they’d originally been talking about. But that shit didn’t work on Eddie and it hadn’t in a real long time. He may have forgotten him for decades, but dealing with Richie’s bullshit was in his blood, in his bones, he had muscle memory in annoyance management. Like riding a bike, there was no erasing this hyper-specific skill set.

“You,” Eddie started, unsure where he was going but going all the same. It was successful in its ultimate goal: getting Richie to shut the fuck up.

“Me?” Richie asked, pointing at himself. 

“You’re,” Eddie started again, he was really going to get somewhere with this, given some time to think, but Richie had never been generous in that.

“I’m?” Richie said back to him, like a game. Eddie glared at him. Richie grinned back. He ran a hand through his hair, smile waning. “Gay?” he asked. “You asking if I’m gay, Eds?”

“You telling me that you’re gay, Rich?” Eddie watched as Richie brought a finger to his own nose, tapping. 

“Ding, ding, ding,” he chimed, “survey says, top answer,” he rambled on, rapping his hands against the table. “Oh, there’s a joke in there somewhere, top answer, I gotta find it.”

“A bad joke within the already terrible joke?”

“I’ve got a reputation to maintain.” Richie kept tapping his hands against the table, and Eddie reached out to still them.

“Well. I’m glad you told me. Trusted me to tell me,” he said, because he’d heard that’s what you say. That’s what he would like to hear, he thought, were he the one doing this (although he wasn’t, and wouldn’t, but _if_ ). Richie snorted at him and took a drink.

“Uh, you’re welcome? Thank you? I never know how to do this part of it, like, it’s uncomfortable no matter what.” Never? How many people had he told? This, and Eddie didn’t know why, was suddenly very important. 

“How many people know?” Eddie asked, curiosity burning a hole in his stomach (it would be a miracle, he thought, if he ended this night without an ulcer). It was unfair, he knew, but he had trouble conceiving of there being anything about Richie that other people knew, but he didn’t. 

“Uh,” Richie said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling in apparent thought. “Any exes, obviously, that comes with the territory. My manager, but that’s really only because we used to fuck—”

“You fuck your manager?”

“Fuck _ed_. Past tense. It’s been years. And if you want to get specific, technically he fucked me.” Eddie didn’t want to get specific. Richie winked at him, and Eddie hands itched.

“Christ, Richie, come on.”

“Hey, you asked.”

“Did I?”

“Anyway,” Richie went on, “then my parents, which went great by the way. Bev knows but I don’t know if I even ever actually told her, and, um, Stan knew.”

“Stan knew?”

“Told him first, actually,” Richie said, smiling that sad sort of smile that came with discussing Stanley.

“You didn’t tell me?” Unfair, Eddie knew, but here he was. 

“I’m sorry, what? I’m telling you now.”

“Yeah, _now_ , but you told Stan, what, in high school?” Unfair, again, but he couldn’t help it. 

“Right, okay, are you making _my_ coming out about _you_ ? Who are you, my mother?” Richie laughed, dry. “She said almost the exact same thing, actually,” he heightened his voice into what ended up being a surprisingly really good impression of Maggie Tozier, “‘ _I just don’t understand why you took so long to tell_ me _. What did_ I _do? Did_ I _make you think you couldn’t trust_ me _? Richard, tell me.’”_ Eddie would be impressed if he weren’t so annoyed.

“That’s not—I’m not—that’s not what I’m trying to do.” He just wanted (unfair, unfair) an explanation, even though he knew he wasn’t owed one. “Shit, Rich, I’m just— I didn’t— I’m sorry I—” Even if he knew that he wanted to say (he didn’t), he couldn’t get words to go into any sort of order. Richie, watching Eddie fidget across the table, cut off his rambling:

“Okay, shit, I believe you, cool your jets.” It was his turn, then, to reach across the table and still Eddie’s hands. Eddie looked down at their hands, then back up at Richie.

“Jets cooled,” Eddie sighed. “Let’s just—can we—let’s—drinks?” Richie laughed at Eddie’s spluttering.

“As you wish, Spaghetti Man, let’s drinks.” 

Eddie was bound and determined to not have this ruin the mood of their night, mentally hoisting himself up by the collar and pushing himself against a locker in the high school hallway of his mind, warning himself about making it feel awkward. 

He’d succeeded, more or less, although he wasn’t sure how much of it was due to his own social prowess and more that Richie was just a difficult person to feel uncomfortable around. There was something inherently likeable about the man, between his shit jokes, shit style, and just general… shittiness. Despite all that, Eddie had realized pretty early on in their friendship that, while there probably was a list of things Richie could do to make Eddie want nothing to do with him anymore, he honestly didn’t know what those things might be. 

* * *

At two o’clock in the morning, Eddie was sat on the sidewalk outside a Duane Reade, head between his knees and maintaining careful eye contact with the pavement, all the while focusing very, very hard on not vomiting. Again. 

He didn’t bother to look up when he heard the doors _swoosh_ open, not wanting to send his world spinning again when he already knew who it was.

“Twelve CCs of Aquafina, stat,” Richie slurred, crouching down in front of Eddie and offering him the bottle of water he’d just bought. Eddie raised his head back up to reach for it, putting out his hand. He watched Richie unscrew the cap for him and press the cold bottle into his hand. 

“Thanks,” Eddie said, before taking several very small sips from the bottle. 

“Least I can do, Eds,” Richie said. “Since I’m pretty sure this is, uh, my fault.” Eddie scoffed, regretting it when his stomach gave a little lurch.

“You didn’t,” Eddie started, “you didn’t, like, _get_ me drunk, that was all me.” Richie grinned at him, and leaned forward to rest a hand on Eddie’s shoulder.

“I did challenge you on those last couple shots, though,” he said, leaning closer, like a secret. Eddie rolled his eyes, another dizzying mistake.

“Ugh,” he said, “yeah, alright, it’s your fault, you asshole.” He shook Richie’s hand off of him, sending Richie falling out of his crouch onto his ass on the sidewalk, laughing. They both took their time standing back up, aiming for no further tumbles and succeeding. Eddie leaned with his back against the side of the building as he watched Richie bend back over to grab Eddie’s cane up from off the ground. He bowed towards Eddie to hand it back to him, and Eddie couldn’t quite stifle a giggle as he accepted it (which would have been embarrassing, had anyone other than Richie been there to hear it). Richie straightened back up, still smiling at him and Eddie, as he’d grown accustomed to, couldn’t help but smile back at him. They both stood there, unmoving, just looking at each other like a pair of weirdos. 

“This was fun,” Eddie said, feeling honest. Richie’s grin spread somehow further across his face and Eddie’s heart sputtered at it. Endearing, Eddie decided then and there, was the word for it. Endearing, always, and after all this time. 

“Let me walk you home,” Richie blurted, and Eddie frowned at him.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I bet you’re fuckin’ exhausted, man, you can just go.”

“No,” Richie insisted, “I just—can I just? If your back hurts or, whatever I can—”

“It’s not that far, I’ll just call a ride or something. Don’t worry about me.” Eddie had barely finished his sentence before Richie barked out a laugh.

“Eddie, I worry about you every single day of my life,” he said. “‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ like that’s not the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. Like every single _second_ you’re not in my direct line of sight I’m not terrified about what’s happening to you.” 

“What? What the fuck, Rich?” Eddie looked up at him, at his skewed glasses and very real look of fear on his face. Richie looked as if he was going to step closer, but didn’t.

“God, shit. I saw you die, man. You know? It took me a fucking week to get your blood out from under my fingernails. I’m just— I’m just.” Richie ran his hands through his own hair, mussing it up more than its usual state of semi-combed disarray. “Just. If you really want me to just go, I will. I know you don’t need _protection_ or anything but, _fuck_ , dude, you know I— I almost lost you once this year. I don’t really wanna go around giving ‘fate’ or whatever another shot. I just got you back.” 

Eddie looked at him. It didn’t make much sense, but there was a lot that Eddie forgot about almost dying. His memories of it were spotty at best (a hearty dose of blood loss and mental/emotional trauma will do that) and he’d been almost thankful for it. There were bits and pieces still rattling around his head, sudden reminders popping up from time to time if he saw or heard something too similar to those moments in the cistern. The dripping of a faucet not fully turned off, the damp air in the pool at the gym, or the smell of sewage rising up out of the grates in the street because he lived in New York _fucking_ City. These set him off, sometimes. Nothing too big, he hadn’t had a meltdown or a freakout or anything. Just the tight grip of panic, clenching around (through?) his gut like a (claw?), like a (claw?), like a _fist,_ holding tight and squeezing. And panic was nothing new to him, Eddie had been panicking his whole life. It may have been, he sometimes thought, the one thing he was truly good at. Seeing Richie panic like this was strange, turned around, backwards. He nodded at Richie.

“Yeah, alright, man,” he said. “If it helps.” He gestured with his head the direction in which to walk, and they both headed that way, stumbling.

“Sorry,” Richie said, after a minute or two. “That was real fucking weird of me, I know you can take care of yourself. Like, shit, not to go all Mrs. K on you but—”

“No, I get it,” he said. He kind of got it. “It’s nice to have you here to, what? Guard me? If fate decides to swing back around and _Final Destination_ me?” It was his turn, Eddie guessed, to try and lighten the mood because this had pretty quickly become not fun _at all._ It must have worked, because Richie chuckled (softly, but a chuckle all the same), and the sound of it eased a weight Eddie hadn't felt building on his shoulders.

“It’s a real danger, Eds,” Richie said, glancing at him. “Tony Todd could be lurking behind any corner. Destiny is some tricky shit. You gotta,” he lowered his voice, “‘beware the risk of cheating the plan, disrespecting the design. You could initiate a horrible fury that would terrorize even the Grim Reaper. And you don't even want to fuck with that MacDaddy.’” Eddie laughed, grabbing at his stomach.

“That verbatim, Rich?”

“Eh, maybe.”

“How many times have you seen that movie?”

“A, uh, handful.”

“Uh-huh. And why?”

“I, uh, I had kind of a thing for Devon Sawa.”

“Fucking _really_?” 

“And,” Richie raised his voice as he started to defend himself, “and it has some really sick death scenes, it’s like an invisible slasher. Like no one can even see it coming and...” He trailed off at this, shrugging. “Not sure it holds up though. Y’know.”

Eddie nodded and moved to gently bump his shoulder against Richie’s. They ended up ordering a ride after a few minutes, both of them exhausted. Richie still walked him into the lobby of his building. Eddie could almost think this felt like the end of a date, but he’d never had a date end like this. Richie must have been thinking something similar, and felt the need to joke about it.

“You the kind of boy to put out on the first date, Mr. Kaspbrak? I _did_ walk you home, which is pretty goddamn gentlemanly of me, if I do say so myself,” he said, glossing over the real reason for his wanting to chaperone Eddie’s way back, and Eddie let him. “I’d say I wanna come up and meet your folks first, but, as you know, your mom and I are already well acquainted.” Eddie glared at him, but it was soft, more sleepy than anything.

“I know you know my mom’s dead, you dick,” he said, reaching forward to push at Richie’s chest and Richie, again, grinned at him. Endearing. Endearing was what it was, squeezing in his chest.

They said their goodbyes, and Richie had just about turned around to go when Eddie reached out, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him in for a hug. 

“Goodnight,” Eddie said, when they pulled apart. “Text me when you get back to the hotel.” Richie nodded and, slower this time, turned to leave the building. Eddie watched him go before pressing the button on the elevator.

He’d asked her not to, but Myra had waited up for him anyway. She fretted about as he tried to get ready for bed, in his separate bedroom, bringing him a glass of water and laying out ibuprofen on the nightstand. He’d pointed out that he was already holding a bottle of water and that there was already ibuprofen inside the nightstand, but she’d done it anyway, compelled. The entire time she spent flitting around him, she was asking questions. Nothing interrogational, just general curiosity over his night. He wanted to scream. _It was fine, Myra! Yes, I had fun, Myra! I don’t understand why you need to know this, Myra!_ It had been his night out and it didn’t need to be important to her, important to anyone but him. 

Richie’s “safe and sound at my bougie ass hotel” text arrived just as Eddie had finally managed to crawl into bed. He shot back a quick response and started to lie down, Myra still peeking in the doorway, asking if there was anything else he needed. He turned off the bedside lamp, he was fucking exhausted, mind still fuzzy from the alcohol and lightheaded from throwing up on the sidewalk. 

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be back in the morning to check on you, alright? Be sure to sleep on your side, just in case, honey, okay?” Eddie dutifully turned onto his side, too tired to do anything but just go with whatever was being said to him.

“Goodnight, Eddie-bear.” Myra stepped back into the hallway, starting to pull the door closed 

“Goodnight, Mommy.” The door stopped closing. Eddie was suddenly very, very awake.

“Myra,” he corrected. “Goodnight, Myra.” 

She shut the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heya folks
> 
> this one is gonna be a little more slow-going, but it's like. half written and well on its way
> 
> title from hum by laura stevenson  
> (those with taste will stream the big freeze)


	2. Act 2: The Peak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, general tw/cw for mentions of canon suicide and emetophobia

The thing they should tell you about near death experiences is that, when it’s all said and done, when you’ve somehow turned around your certain demise and you’re standing on the other side of all of it, banged up but still whole, you will do everything in your power to not think about it.

It may or may not be on purpose and you may or may not be aware of it. You’re aware, of course, that you almost died, but only in the abstract. Not in a real way, where you can feel every nerve ending scream out about still getting to scream out and you can feel the life you almost lost burning through the whole of you. It’s not like that because you know it can’t, because you know you can’t. 

You don’t let yourself because you can’t let yourself. You shove the excruciating knowledge of your own mortality into the back corners of your mind, where you keep all of your favorite things you don’t like to think about. It’s still there, of course, but it will be easier to ignore, easier to not look at, to not think about.

Even though you want to. God, you want to think about it so much it aches your heart like a toothy smile and warm hands, or something just as stupid, until it’s too much, too much, too much. But, like you do all heartache, you run away from it, thinking that this time, maybe this time you’ll run fast enough to really shake it.

You won’t.

* * *

Finding a marriage counselor was a pain the ass.

Eddie knew this, they’d done this before. And again before that. But it never became less of a fucking hassle. He’d read enough online reviews and made enough phone calls that they all started to blur together.

After a couple of weeks of single sessions with a variety of counselors, he and Myra had finally landed on one that they both liked enough to give an honest shot at helping figure their shit out. 

Grant (who was very insistent on them calling him Grant; he was one of those “oh, Mr. Everly is my father” types) was a peppy man a few years Eddie’s junior with neat black hair and a seemingly endless supply of crew neck sweaters in every conceivable color. Myra liked Grant because he oozed positivity (almost to a fucking fault). Eddie liked Grant because he was five foot six (result of some kind of complex or not, Eddie had, over time, become very good at eyeballing a man’s height, he’d just have to look a man up and down and then he’d, he would, he’d—). These had been reasons enough for the both of them to settle for him, if only because he was their fifth attempt in half as many weeks and they were both ready to get this over with.

Grant had reminded them, at the beginning of their second session, that this wasn’t going to be a quick thing, but would have to be a whole _process_.

“It’s not like I’m just changing the oil on your marriage. This isn’t gonna be a quick one-and-done in-office procedure,” he explained. “It’s going to be work, for both of you.” 

Eddie knew this already, he _did_ , but hearing it said aloud still sucked. 

“But,” Grant continued, “we’re going to ease into things. So we’re going to start with an icebreaker.” Eddie frowned and Myra shifted beside him. He edged a bit nearer to the arm of the couch, so they weren’t so goddamn close.

“An icebreaker?” he asked. “We’re married. How much more broken can the ice get?” Myra shifted beside him again, and he leaned forward, towards Grant. Grant smiled at him

“It’s never too late to learn something new about your spouse. We can start with something simple you might just never have shared. Let’s say,” he thought for a moment, “how about a childhood anecdote. Completely random. Whatever comes to mind that you might not have told each other before now.”

Eddie had to give it to Grant, he was a talented topic picker. Eddie had a whole childhood’s worth of anecdotes to choose from, all of which had only recently come back into his possession. The only issue was picking which one to share, there were so many (and he had to sort through and file away all clown and clown-adjacent stories). He’d still been considering what story to go with when he realized that Myra had been talking, giving her own anecdote as he tried to choose his. Uh, shit, shit. He nodded at her as she continued, and he tried to actively listen. In the end he’d got the gist of it and, embarrassingly, could not, gun to his head, tell if he’d heard it before. He wasn’t going to be quizzed on this was he? Oh, god, what if he was going to be quizzed on this? Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Shit. Fuck.

“Mr. Kaspbrak?” Eddie was brought out of his mental swearing streak by Grant, still sat across from him. “It’s your turn.” 

Eddie nodded at him, and just started talking. He ended up talking about his junior prom. It was one of his last memories of Derry from Before since his mother moved them across state lines just before the start of his senior year. But before that, during the back half of their junior year, there were memories, happy ones, even. By that point, a solid chunk of the Losers had skipped town for greener, less creepy pastures, so only him, Richie, Mike, and Stan were left. The actual prom itself was boring, Stan was the only one with a date and Mike couldn’t be there because of the whole “home school” thing. They stuck around for maybe half an hour before Stan’s date dumped him for the guy she’d been trying to make jealous and they took that as a pretty good sign that prom just wasn’t going to be their “thing.” They took off, picked up Mike (and some booze Richie had got his sister to buy and leave in a ditch for them), and wandered down to the clubhouse, which hadn’t seen much use since Ben left halfway through sophomore year. 

“We just made our own, shitty, four-dude prom, and it was— it was amazing. And Richie, oh my god,” he stopped for a second as it all came back to him, “he made Stan and Mike watch us try to re-enact the whole _Dirty Dancing_ routine, lifts and all. And he made _me_ be Patrick Swayze.” He glanced up at Grant as he explained. “He’s like, four inches taller than me, it was a _shitshow_ .” It had absolutely been a shitshow, but Eddie couldn’t help but grin as he went through the story, continuing to tell about how when, inevitably, Richie tried to dive into his arms and he couldn’t catch him, they’d both gone tumbling backwards into the hammock, sending it crashing to the ground. He could remember it like it was yesterday, the way the hammock _almost_ managed to hold them but then gave out completely, how Stan and Mike lost their shit laughing as soon as he and Richie raised their arms in thumbs ups to let them know they were fine. 

Eddie had been out of breath, at that point, the wind knocked out of him from his fall to the floor only intensified by how Richie had landed on his stomach, all of his sharp angles digging into Eddie’s skin. It’d been uncomfortable, but he remembered that they just lay there like that for a while. The floor had been so dusty, truly fucking disgusting, but he hadn’t cared. At some point, they got up and they all restrung the hammock. 

“Stan got so pissy—he was the only one of us who was ever a boy scout—because we kept doing the knots wrong. I _know_ Richie was doing it on purpose, it drove all of us fucking crazy. We, um, went home at some point. I’m pretty sure I stayed at Richie’s. I spent, like, half my weekends there.” He could remember it distinctly, the two of them squeezed into Richie’s bed, even when it’d gotten way too small for them. It was what they were used to, so they kept at it. It had never been uncomfortable, but they had an unspoken rule where they absolutely did not talk about it, and it only happened with one-on-one sleepovers. It was their thing, for just them. He didn’t tell Grant and Myra this part, it wasn’t theirs to know. 

Grant didn’t quiz them on each other’s stories, which was more than welcome because he didn’t really have anything to say about Myra’s story. He and Myra just chatted with him about how some things make them _feel_ , and he sent them off with fucking _homework_ and appointments to meet with each of them individually before their next session. 

* * *

“Eddie,” Grant started, opening their first solo session, “is it fine if I call you that?”

“Uh, sure.” 

“Alright,” Grant said. “Welcome back, Eddie, I’m really glad you’re here. Now, I gotta ask, did you do your homework?” 

He was the type of person who did their homework, so he had done his homework. Or had tried to, anyway. It was the kind of open ended, loose-if-any guidelines style of assignment that had caused him no small amount of distress in every English class he’d ever taken. The kind that the teacher never had a rubric for and refused him one when he asked because that wasn’t “the point” of the assignment. Which was bullshit, the point of homework was to be graded on it, how was he supposed to know how to do it right without a rubric?

Grant had also not given Eddie a rubric, but he also wasn’t grading him. Not in a way that mattered anyway, not in a way with letters, and records, and performance reviews. But still, his instruction was vague, leaving Eddie with the fear of “doing it wrong” thrumming under his skin. 

“Alright then.” Grant leaned back in his chair once Eddie nodded. “Tell me about it.”

“Tell you— I just— tell you about it? I wrote it down,” he gestured to the piece of paper he’d sat on the coffee table between them, one page, double-sided, single-spaced. A whole lot of words that added up to a whole lot of nothing, but he _did it._ Grant just nodded at him.

“And that’s excellent, Eddie, but I want to hear it from you. Straight from the source.” Grant tapped at his own temple. “So, let’s say, you go to bed tonight, and while you’re sleeping a miracle happens. How are things different for you then? Let’s start with waking up, what’s the first thing you notice.”

“Well, my back wouldn’t hurt,” he suggested, having remembered writing something along those lines. 

“So you wouldn’t have had your accident?”

“I mean, if we’re talking miracles.”

“And we are.”

“Then, yeah, I mean—” He thought back to the moment in question. It was hazy, the skewering itself, fuzzy from the shock, and the pain, and the not really wanting to remember it in the first place.

But. 

What if he’d ducked? What if he’d rolled him and Richie to safety? What if Richie had never got his dumbass self caught in the deadlights at all? Or, since they were talking miracles, after all, what if Eddie had actually managed to kill IT when he thought he had? What if he hadn’t let himself be overexcited, and prematurely triumphant, and full of stupid, stupid, _stupid fucking hubris_? 

Or! Or! _Or,_ what if, since they weren’t just courting the impossible but making sweet, tender love to it, what if It never even came back? What if they’d really managed to finish the job that first time?

_God_ , then what if they hadn’t got their memories stolen? What if he hadn’t had to spend the better part of thirty years without them? Everybody who left would have remembered, could have visited.

Or. 

“I’d have,” Eddie started again, slow, searching for a way to explain it all that didn’t sound absolutely fucking insane, “I would have kept better touch with, with all my friends. From growing up. That’s where it all started, y’know?”

“I don’t think I do,” said Grant. “How about you explain it to me?” Eddie fought the urge to roll his eyes. How could he ever explain, _really_ explain?

“I got hurt when I was back home. I was back home because I had a funeral. A funeral for one of my best friends that I completely forgot about. He, um, he. He. Killed himself.” He gestured around one of his wrists and then felt gross about having done it. It got the point across. 

“Eddie, I need you to know that that wasn’t your fault. It’s incredibly common for people to lose touch with the friends they grew up with.”

“No. Not with them. Not with us.” He rubbed at his eyes. This sucked, this sucked, this _sucked._ He took a deep breath. “When I went back for the, the _funeral_ , when we all saw each other again, it felt like I got punched in the chest, just, just knocked to the fucking floor from the—” Love, he knew, was the word but it didn’t feel right, wasn’t heavy enough. He gestured instead, stiffly, with both arms, a terrible interpretive dance to get across an emotion too big to say. 

Grant just nodded at him, as if he understood what Eddie was trying to say, which he doubted, since Eddie didn’t even know for sure, not really. He watched Grant finish up jotting something down on his clipboard (which made Eddie nervous; he knew it was part of the whole “process” and he’d always been a big fan of taking notes, but the idea of all these _things_ inside him being reduced to a handful of bullet points didn’t sit right with him). Grant set the clipboard back in his lap and looked up at him.

“Alright then,” he said. “Tell me about them. If your miracle happened.”

And Eddie did. 

He’d thought, as he struggled to get the first words out, that it would be difficult coming up with this alternate history for himself. But, as soon as he began to describe it out loud, he found himself unable to stop as the words came pouring out of him before he could even realized that he’d thought them at all. He told him all the little things he’d considered before, in the months after leaving Derry that second time, and all the enormous things he hadn’t even conceived of until the moment they fell out of his mouth. About breaks from college and cross-country road trips, regular get-togethers and phone calls. About being at Bill’s wedding, being _in_ Bill’s wedding. Getting to really know everybody as they grew older together, maybe not physically, but emotionally, at least. About being able to _know_ the Richie he spent decades missing out on, having him to talk to and to have him talk to Eddie in turn, getting to actually be there for his best friend. Richie could have bounced jokes off of him, to help with writing so he wouldn’t have had to sell out just to succeed. They’d always been one hell of a team and Eddie, only now, was realizing just how much he’d missed it. Without even knowing. God. And now, missing him still, missing _them_ still, but at least getting to know who it was he was missing.

Still, if no one had moved, if no one had skipped town, if they all could have had high school together, at least. Getting Ben to help him with his geometry homework, going on the kinds of adventures Bill could have planned once they could drive, and Bev, Bev could have always been there to talk to about anything he couldn’t bring up with the guys, to talk to about, talk about, about— 

They could have visited each other, after they all left. Winter vacations, and spring breaks, and road trips, him and Richie off to see Mike in Florida, Bill in LA, or, or Stan in Atlanta. Seeing Stan in.

In.

Stan wouldn’t be dead, then, would he?

Dumb question. Eddie knew he wouldn’t.

Eddie hadn’t realized, until he felt a tissue being pressed into his hand, that he was crying. Eddie knew none of it had been his, not really, but it still felt stolen. He felt cheated all the same. It was a beautiful maybe that _fate_ , or _God_ , or _Tony fucking Todd_ had never been going to let them have, and he had no choice in weeping for it. 

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, wiping at his face with the tissue. “I don’t,” he sniffled, “I don’t know what this is.” He gestured to his face. He knew exactly what it was, of course, but there was no way to talk about it without getting himself stuffed in a van to go shuffle around a courtyard in a thin gown and a pair of borrowed sweatpants. 

Grant assured him that it was fine, that unbottling emotions was good, even if he didn’t understand what they were yet. Told him that he could continue whenever he was ready, and so Eddie did. 

Grant just listened as Eddie’s stream-of-consciousness monologue spilled out of him, looking away only to jot down a few notes. When Eddie finished, Grant smiled at him. 

“Alright,” Grant said. “So, that would be your life, if you had your miracle?” Eddie hesitated, to think if he forgot anything, and then nodded. 

Grant nodded back to him and wrote something else down before looking back up at Eddie and asking:

“What about Myra?”

“What?” Eddie didn’t understand.

“Your dream life. You mentioned Bill’s wife and Stan’s wife, but not your own.” Eddie’s stomach dropped. 

“I, uh—”

“You know, Eddie, in order for couple’s counseling to be successful, both partners have to not just be _willing_ to put in the effort, but _want_ to. They both have to _want_ it to work out, otherwise it never will. And why would it?”

“Listen, man,” Eddie said, bristling, “I love my wife, okay? I don’t know what you’re trying to, to, to do here, but I—” He sputtered out and Grant didn’t speak again until Eddie had fully given up his unformed argument.

“No one’s accusing you of not loving your wife,” Grant told him. “Except maybe yourself.” The phone sat on the end table next to Grant chimed, signalling the end of the session. “I want you to think about it. All of it. And talk to Myra, whatever happens, it’s always better if there’s communication.”

Eddie nodded at him and stood to leave, but stopped when Grant started talking again:

“And, whatever happens with the couple sessions, I’d still like to see you one-on-one. Is that alright?”

Eddie nodded again and walked out the door.

Another thing they should tell you about things you want to forget? 

You can run as fast as you want but you _are_ going to stumble.

You will trip. 

You will fall. 

And memories run faster than you could ever imagine; they will catch up to you. 

* * *

Eddie cried.

Eddie cried a lot lately. 

It brought him back to his stark white hospital room back in Derry, back to all the tears he watched Richie cry. Which had to be as a result of some kind of Derry Weirdness. It made sense now, he thought, the sheer volume of Richie’s tears. Because now Eddie felt like he had been crying over any and everything. He teared up every time Ben and Bev instagrammed their new dog, he cried any time Mike updated then on his travel itineraries, whenever Bill opened up to them about writing, about fixing his marriage (Eddie should be able to say something to that, to confide in Bill about it, or, in the least, _relate_ to it; when he couldn’t he just cried some more). When Richie sent something he thought was funny, just to Eddie, even when it wasn’t actually funny (often), it was still always special and Eddie, infuriatingly, cried about it. He cried every single time he unfolded Stan’s letter from the planner in the drawer of his bedside table and read over it again, and again, and again. 

He cried when his physical therapist gave him the green light on driving again. When he pulled out into the street to drive himself to work, the moment he glanced up into the rear view to find his building out-of-sight and himself truly alone in a car for the first time in weeks, he cried. 

That had been the last straw; emotional driving was one of the top causes of crashes and he didn’t want to think about what another at-fault accident would do to the cost of his insurance. Plus, the crying had been going on long enough that Myra was bound to notice and Eddie was steadily understanding that he just plain didn’t have the emotional bankroll to deal with that. At the moment. He would, he _would,_ after some time, if everything would just get _fucking settled already._

But he couldn’t get his shit together and his face was so puffy from it that Myra was _worried_ he was taking in too much sodium which was bullshit because Eddie had been carefully monitoring his sodium levels for years and she knew that. And were she to find out about the crying she’d be _worried_ about that as well. And while, yeah, Eddie was pretty fucking worried about the whole crying thing too, it was _his_ crying thing. Was it unfair to expect his wife to just ignore her chronically sobbing husband? 

Uh, yeah? Honestly? He got it, he really did, but he thought he might just be teetering towards the edge of not caring anymore. So it wasn’t fair. Whoop-de-fuck. Who really gave a shit? It was normal to not want her to worry.

It took him another three days, but he got himself to try and talk to Myra about what Grant had said, at least. He’d spent four-and-half minutes staring at himself in the mirror of their ensuite, mentally psyching himself up to undergo the massive undertaking that was healthy communication with his wife. Surely it hadn’t always been this hard, right? It couldn’t have. Still, the idea of saying anything made his stomach churn. He didn’t really know where he was going with it, but maybe they could figure that out together. Just that it— it wasn’t working. And maybe he could funnel his HSA money into something that wasn’t a lost cause. 

Richie had told him, back in the cistern, that he was braver than he thought. He didn’t really think that applied here, the idea of having to ruminate on his own bravery just to _talk to his own wife_ was laughable at best (and even then, it was that bravery that almost got him, almost got him, that _saved Richie’s life,_ but almost got— _)._ But he still thought about it and it still helped. He pointed at his reflection in the mirror, told the pale, tired man he saw there (god, did he always look like that; big, tired eyes shining like he was liable to burst into hysterics at any moment, _Christ_ ) to stop being a pussy, and tottered out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.

“Myra, I think we need to talk. About the counseling,” he said as he walked in, stopping just inside the doorway as he watched his wife turn towards him from her place in front of the coffeemaker. She just looked at him for a second and Eddie could feel his determination start to putter out. They stood in silence for what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds but dragged far beyond that. Eddie was just considering claiming a fever and just heading back to bed when Myra spoke:

“I think you’re right,” she said, and Eddie suddenly wasn’t sure if he knew what those words meant. 

“I am?” he asked, leaning now against the doorframe.

“Of course, honey. I’ve been thinking,” Myra said, turning back to the coffeemaker to pour herself her morning cup, carefully spooning out the sugar, “we should stop going.” Eddie’s position at the doorframe became less of an attempt to look casual and more of a necessity to keep him upright. It wasn’t that he and Myra never agreed on anything (they’d agreed to get married, after all, she’d suggested it was about time and he’d agreed), but it’d never really been like this. It hadn’t ever been like this. (It hadn’t been like. Like—)

“Oh?” he said. Myra turned back around and smiled at him, mug in hand, and went to sit down at the kitchen table. (This shouldn’t be unfamiliar, it isn’t novel, or anything, they agree on things, they agree on things, _of course_ they agree on things but, but, but—)

“We’ve tried this so many times, you’d think we’d learn that it’s just not going to work,” she busied herself stirring her coffee gently, careful not to drip onto the antique table (it wasn’t “antique” so much as it was just “old;” it was one of the few things that Eddie had taken with him from his mother’s house after she died and that was enough for Myra to consider it a Kaspbrak family heirloom which was enough for him to agree with her over it, see, see there was something they agreed on). He moved to sit and join her, watching her her blow a cooling ripple across her cup of coffee.

“After all,” she sat the coffee back down, hands cradled around the mug, “no one knows our marriage better than we do. It’s nothing we can’t fix on our own, we’ve always managed it before. Just another little hiccup. Eddie, honey, are you feeling alright?” 

He had stopped halfway through pulling out his chair. He nodded at her and pushed his chair back into the table, stepping away from it.

“Right,” he said, sounding wrong. “What?” Myra stood up and crossed the kitchen to him, gently laying the back of her hand across his forehead. He nodded and stepped back away, muttered something about having an “early meeting,” and made his way out of the house.

He was doing fine.

* * *

Eddie was doing more than fine. 

He was doing awesome.

Fan-fucking-tastic, actually.

He was getting comfortably settled back into his life, settled in, nice and neat, just as he was meant to be.

He was growing more and more accustomed to the cane, successfully adjusting to one of his life’s small alterations. 

Myra asked him to call and cancel their counseling appointments, and he’d agreed with her, so even his marriage was getting back to normal.

But.

On the phone with the receptionist, when he’d been asked whether he wanted to cancel all of his appointments, or just the couple session, he paused. They asked again whether he’d wanted to keep his own appointments. He said “yes.”

So, on Thursdays, he skipped lunch and left work half-an-hour early, sat in Grant’s office for fifty-five minutes, talked circles around whatever his issues might have been, and arrived home forty minutes later than usual. He’d been telling Myra he was pulling overtime to make up for the weeks he missed while in the hospital. It had been months and he’d long since been settled back in at work, but she wanted to believe him and so she did. 

Eddie lied.

Eddie lied a lot.

He was growing more and more accustomed to lying to her. Or, getting more and more accustomed to realizing he was lying to her, and, somehow, accustomed to how much he enjoyed it. He was good at it, lying, always had been, he’d had the kind of childhood that necessitated that. The years and years of _I’m just going over to the Denbrough’s to study_ only helped to, decades later, make _sorry, honey, I have a late meeting_ all the more believable. It was a skill, unethical as it may have been, but he had honed it and it was his. And he liked the idea of things being his, his, his, after a decade our _ours, ours, ours_ , the concept of having anything to himself, just keeping _anything_ to himself was exhilarating. 

He’d gone to a deli for lunch one Tuesday, ordered thick layers of pastrami on marbled rye, grilled in butter, dripping in cheese and thousand island and then, that night, when Myra asked what he’d done for lunch he said he’d had a salad. He did the same thing that next Tuesday, and when she asked again, he’d told her he’d actually been trying intermittent fasting and hadn’t eaten lunch at all. She’d listed off some benefits about it she’d read in some article somewhere and he’d nodded at them as if every angle of their conversation wasn’t complete bullshit.

He disconnected her from the Find My Friends app on his phone (she wanted them to both be able to keep track of each other; she was terrified of being human trafficked and he’d, well, agreed) and lied when she asked about it. She’d told him he should get it checked out at the Apple store and he didn’t, but he said he did when she asked. He went out for drinks with his coworkers, and, when he came home she’d asked if he’d been drinking and he told her, plainly, “no.” She had looked him up and down, smelling the quarter bottle of Coors Lite that Data Entry Daniel had spilled on Eddie’s jacket, and nodded. She wouldn’t have a husband that drank and he was her husband. And by the transitive property, something, something, _something._

He was high on it. He was _giddy._ It was a game, collecting bits and pieces of information that were his alone. Never anything actually bad, he didn’t think, although he did wonder if Myra thought he was cheating on her. He kind of wished he were, actually, it made more sense to lie about an affair than it did to lie about lunches, and work outings, and mental healthcare. But he kept at it. 

One session, after Eddie made the mistake of actually telling his therapist anything of note, Grant asked him why he thought he was doing this. 

Eddie thought about it for a moment, cried, and was made to talk about his mother.

He really was doing alright.

* * *

“Hey, man, are you alright?”

“What? Sorry, yeah, why?” Eddie asked, coming back to himself from where he was staring into the middle distance at a stoplight. He heard Richie chuckle on the other line from the hands free setup of his Escalade. 

“You were just spaced out. While driving, which, while I love to see you take some risks, this is a weird way to do it.”

“Have you—-” Eddie stopped himself.

“Have I what?”

“Never mind.” After a moment, Richie picked back up the conversation.

“Alright, if you say so. Anyway,” Richie changed the subject, “you know how I had that tableread with, like, not Apatow, obviously, but one of his kind-of pals and—”

“Have you been feeling weird lately?” Eddie interrupted, giving up and pulling his car into a parking lot. “Like, since you’ve been back. After Derry?”

“What do you mean? Weird?” Eddie rolled his eyes. It was a legitimate question, but still.

“Have you been, uh, more emotional? Or anything,” he added, quickly. When Richie didn’t immediately respond, Eddie continued, saying: “I’ve just been. I’ve been crying a lot? Thought it might be some kind of, some kind of weird Derry side effect, right?” He cringed when Richie didn’t answer right away.

“Sure,” Richie said, after a moment. “I’ve been, uh, it’s been heavy on the waterworks over here too.” Eddie sighed, weight lifting off his shoulders.

“Oh, thank god, I thought I was having an episode or something.”

“Don’t you dare have an episode if I’m not there to see it.” 

“I’ll try,” Eddie chuckled. “But, yeah, it’s just been really weird to be back here, I think? I can’t focus at work and, me and Myra, we tried counseling again—“

“Counseling?” Richie interrupted. “What, you call her ‘mommy’ again or something?” Eddie froze at that, he hadn’t thought he’d told Richie about either incident, he was sure he would have remembered that.

“I,” Eddie started, “Did I— did I tell you about that?” Silence on the other line. Eddie glanced down at the dashboard display to make sure the call was still connected, and it was.

“Holy shit, Eds,” Richie spoke up, finally. “I was— Oh my god, I was joking. Did that really happen? Like— Did you really—“ Eddie could hear him starting to crack up and knew he wouldn’t be living this one down. Richie could go ahead and tack this onto the long list of things he could make fun of Eddie about, although Eddie had a similarly lengthy list for Richie too.

“Well, good talk, Tozier, but I’m heading into a tunnel, so I’ll catch you—“ Eddie hung up before finishing. Great. Okay. Embarrassing revelations aside, that went just fine. And he now had further evidence on this all being some clown-caused fuckery. Good. Good. 

He called Bev, next, later that evening, crouched on the floor of his bedroom and setting down the duffel bag he’d bought on a whim on his lunch in the corner where he’d started to stack things (there just wasn’t enough storage in the guest room, was all). Hearing that Richie was also going through whatever they were going through had been consoling, it _had_. But, as with any condition, be it medical or emotional (or, in this case, overwhelmingly emotional) he wanted a second opinion.

He got both his second and third opinions in a social BOGO kind of deal when Bev picked up to reveal that she was, of course, with Ben, leading to an impromptu facetime session where they both denied having any crying episodes and asked if he was doing alright. He stuttered through a reassurance that he was just fine and turned the topic back towards them. He listened to them gush about their time at sea, their new dog, their new house. Eddie was happy to listen. Hearing them update him about the changes they had already made and the ones they were still making made his heart ache with love for them. 

He cut the call short when he heard Myra get home from her book club. It was fine, he just didn’t want her asking questions. Having to explain his friends to her again, like she just couldn’t get it. He didn’t want to talk to her, but he’d promised they’d go out tonight, promised they’d discuss the “bedroom situation.” 

He crawled onto his own bed, wondering if he'd be able to get out of dinner if he’d feigned a head cold. But then she’d want to sit by his bedside with a cold compress, a bottle of NyQuil, and stories about her day. If he went to dinner, he’d only have the stories to contend with. 

He gave Bill a call when he got back from dinner that night, but cut it short when he started talking about his book, about his marriage, about Mike coming to visit. Which was all great, just. It was all the confirmation he needed on the Bill front. 

He called Mike, finally, that next morning on his drive to work, unsure of what timezone he was inhabiting that day. Mike picked up, early as it was, and filled Eddie in on his adventures through the southwest. Eddie was happy to chat with him, Mike a warm presence on the other line, so he waited until they had a chance to really catch up before he dropped his question, hoping Mike could relate, at least. (Yes, yes, Richie could relate but, for some reason, that didn’t count).

Mike, unfortunately, reacted much like the rest of his friends.

“Oh,” Mike said, soft, and Eddie knew this wasn’t going where he’d wanted it. “I mean, I cried when I saw the Grand Canyon a couple days ago. But I don’t think that’s what you—”

“Not what I mean, yeah,” Eddie finished for him. There was silence, Eddie not knowing what to say and hoping Mike would manage something so he wouldn’t have to. 

“Hey, I’m not trying to overstep or anything here,” Mike said, blessedly breaking the silence. “But, are you seeing anyone? Like, a therapist? I know Bill’s said his has really helped him get his stuff worked out. Honestly, if you ask me, we should all be in therapy. People just don’t end up well-adjusted after the lives we’ve had, right?”

Eddie, of course, did have a therapist, who he saw regularly and lied to almost as much as he lied to his wife. Well, he didn’t lie, exactly (to his therapist, he was absolutely lying to his wife), except by omission, maybe. But he didn’t have to tell Grant anything if he didn’t want to, and, at this point, he was more-or-less just paying for someone to listen to him bitch. A solid investment, if it kept him from calling Richie at all hours of the day just to do the same thing. Richie was a busy man, probably, as far as Eddie could tell from the twitter account he gave up and followed, and Eddie wasn’t going to try and demand more attention than he was owed. Even if he kind of wanted to. 

Still, Richie called him that next morning, as Eddie had just settled into the car for his commute. He’d been just about to get on him again about still being awake in the tiny hours of the morning when Richie interrupted him.

“No, nope, no timezone shit,” he said. “Guess who’s in NYC, baby?” 

“Why?”

“I said ‘guess.’” Eddie rolled his eyes.

“Is it you, Rich?”

“Got it in one, Kaspbrak!” Richie whooped, straining the speakers of Eddie’s hands-free display. It was early and Richie’s shouting clawed at his ears, but Eddie smiled to hear him. 

“I’m gonna ask why, again.” Eddie said, and Richie chuckled.

“I got, a, uh, thing,” Richie said.

“A thing?”

“A thing,” Richie confirmed. “Just, there’s some, um, NDA shit with it. It’s a top secret, on the downlow, Hollywood confidential kinda joint.” Eddie hummed at that. Made sense. 

“Got it. You free at all, then?” Eddie asked, getting to what was now the point. He hadn’t seen Richie since he visited while was still on tour. He missed him. Plain and simple.

“Me, free? Let me check my schedule,” Richie said. He went quiet for a few moments, and Eddie could almost see him miming flipping through a nonexistent datebook. “Yeah,” he said at last, “my thing isn’t for a couple days, so I’m free free free ‘til then.” It wasn’t funny, but Eddie chuckled at it. 

“Well, I’ll be ‘free free free’ at five. That work?”

“Hell yes, I got like five more bars I didn’t get to show you last time.”

* * *

They didn’t go to bars this time, but to dinner. They slid into a little two-top booth at a perfectly shitty diner down the way from Richie’s unshitty hotel. Eddie reached across the table to unwrap the paper napkin from around Richie’s silverware and used it to dab at a spot on the table the busser had missed.

“Trying to get a tip there?” 

“Always. You know how filthy these tables are? Even when they don’t miss obvious grease with their germ-infested rags.” Richie smiled, shaking his head.

“I’m lucky you never worked in the restaurant industry or I’d never get you out to a restaurant again. You couldn’t handle the behind the scenes. It would kill you.” Richie’s face fell after that, just slightly, and Eddie decided not to notice. He didn’t know how to change the subject, though, and they fell into silence. Not uncomfortable, never with Richie, but there was an undercurrent and the thrumming and itching under Eddie’s skin made their appearance. 

“I don’t wanna go all ‘very special episode,’ on you, Eds,” Richie started and trailed off, face scrunching in apparent thought. 

“What?” Eddie tensed, fingers gripping around the plastic menu in front of him. 

“It’s just.” Richie stopped again. “Never mind. Hey, how old do you think these menus are? Like, were they always yellow or is that just what happens to old lamination?” He waved his menu in front of Eddie’s face, wiggling it to make that terrible laminated paper noise. Eddie grabbed his wrist and brought it down to the table, peeling the menu out of Richie’s grip and setting it back down in front of him.

“Richie,” he said, and looked at him, at Richie’s eyes nervous behind his glasses, the suggestion of dark circles under his eyes. Not as dark as Eddie’s, but still, a matching set. Richie shook his head.

“No, just,” he sighed, rolling his eyes, only to then lock eyes with Eddie. “Just. Just drop it, alright?” It wasn’t alright, but Eddie nodded, slow.

“Alright,” Eddie said, planning to bring it up again, if he remembered, and looked back down at his menu to play a mental tug-of-war between the burger and salad selections. Richie was quiet on his side of the table and Eddie’s stomach churned at it. “You, uh, you really can’t tell me anything about what you got going on this week?” he tried, Richie lifting eyes to look at him as he spoke.

“Nope,” he said, “not a word of it. Classified.” The weird tension was easing, and Eddie leaned into it.

“Ah, c’mon. I’d tell you all about my job,” Eddie said. And he would, if Richie would ever actually want to hear it. Although Eddie himself didn’t even want to hear about his own job these days. 

“Aww, Eds, you’d break confidentiality protocol for me? It’s a shame I don’t care about mortgage loans—“

“You know that’s not what I do.”

“But don’t think that I’m gonna tell you just because you’re you.” Richie wagged his finger at him and something in Eddie’s chest stuttered. “There’s no, um, there’s no,” Richie snapped his fingers, “there’s no Kaspbrak Clause in my contract.” 

Their server came up to them at that point, drawing the argument to a well-needed close as Richie rattled off some truly heinous burger, cheese fries, and shake combo. When the server turned to him, Eddie said he’d have the same. The grin that broke across Richie’s face would almost be worth the inevitable heartburn.

“Well, well, well. Dr. K’s finally eating some real food, is he?” Richie teased, reaching across to poke at Eddie, who gently whapped his hand away. 

“I’m mixing it up,” Eddie said, because he was.

“Trying to live a little?” Eddie shrugged at that.

“Sure, by eating something that’ll cut days off my life. Guess I got some to spare, now,” he half-joked, and Richie half-chuckled at it, eyes grim. (Eddie had heard somewhere that the formula for comedy was “tragedy plus time”, but he supposed he didn’t know just how much time it would take for any of what happened to them to ever be funny. Apparently “six months” was not the answer, judging by _Richie’s_ reaction.)

They talked on the phone often, both in the Losers’ group chat and phone calls alone with each other but they still had no trouble keeping conversation going through the rest of their greasy dinner, hardly slowing down even to eat. 

They finished their meal soon enough, and, not yet ready to go their separate ways, decided to walk around a nearby park, Richie stopping into a chain coffee shop to grab them something to help warm them up in the cold February air. 

“I’ll even get you your fake milk shit,” Richie had said, patting Eddie on the head. “Just for you.” Eddie shook Richie off, glaring up at him.

“You’re lactose intolerant too, dumbass. Sorry I don’t want to be constipated all week.” Richie moved his hand down to gently slap at Eddie’s cheek, careful to go for the side that hadn’t been stabbed, even though it didn’t hurt anymore. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Richie said, employing an annoying, deep and drawn out Voice before dropping it back to his own. “Did you forget what you just ate for dinner? You think one oat milk latte is gonna counterbalance cheese fries?” Eddie didn’t have an argument to that, and dropped it. When Richie returned with their coffees, Eddie’s had been plainly marked as dairy-free. 

Their walk didn’t last long, the two of them exhausted from their overlarge dinner and Eddie’s back aching because that was what it did now. 

“Thanks, man, for the coffee,” Eddie said, as they sat down on a metal park bench, the cold of the seat creeping through the material of his slacks. Richie nudged at him with his shoulder, careful, again. Eddie didn’t know what to do with this new, careful Richie. He turned his head a bit, glancing at Richie beside him, the way the cold air had his face flushed, the heat of the coffee he sipped steaming up his glasses. Eddie smiled. It was cold, but this was warm, he thought. He felt his phone buzz in his pocket, but ignored it.

Richie, however, did not ignore the buzzing of his phone and scooted forward to pull his (Caseless? What the _fuck,_ Rich?) phone out of his back pocket. Eddie turned fully to face him when Richie unlocked his phone and let out a gasp. 

“Whoa, what?” Eddie asked, and Richie shook his head.

“Just,” Richie said, barking out a laugh. “Just check the group chat.” Eddie pulled his own phone out, typed out his long passcode, and pulled up the chat. There was one new message, but the little grey bubble with the dots kept popping up, going away, and popping up again. The one message, once Eddie actually looked at it, was a picture from Bev. Just a simple, unfiltered photo of her left hand, an elegant diamond ring now adorning it. Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” Eddie said and Richie laughed harder.

“Right? Holy shit!” Richie typed out a reply and sent it, sending Eddie’s phone buzzing again. And then again, and again, and again as the rest of his friends reacted to the announcement. “Ben actually did it, I was so sure he was going to bitch out. Hold on to the ring for another twenty-seven years, you know?” 

“He told you he was going to, um, to propose?” Eddie asked, feeling weird. He hadn’t been in as much personal contact with the rest of the Losers as he could have, he supposed. 

“Oh, yeah,” Richie kept giggling. “He started asking for ring advice, like I was supposed to know? Like, liking dudes does not a fashion know-er make, right? So, I tell him this and he’s all,” he lowers his voice in a very bad impression of Ben, “I didn’t—that’s not what I—I’m so sorry, Richie.” Richie dropped the impression. “Thought he _offended me_ , hilarious.” Eddie chuckled, and nodded, but couldn’t keep his mind quite focused. Ben and Bev, after all these years, it felt almost unreal. Just. What a huge change for the both of them, and after only six months, with Bev’s divorce still in-process just. Just. What a leap of faith, was all. 

“Turns out,” Richie continued his story, “he just wanted to tell me because he knew if I snitched to Bev she wouldn’t believe me. Which _is_ offensive. I’m great at secrets. Obviously.” He gestured up and down at himself.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, still in thought. Richie leaned forward and over to look him closer in the eyes.

“You alright?” Eddie gave half a nod, which wasn’t, apparently, good enough, because Richie didn’t back away. “You sure about that?”

“It’s just,” Eddie thought again for a second, “huge. It’s such a huge thing they’re doing.”

“Yeah?” 

Eddie shook his head, letting out a nervous laugh.

“It feels like everyone is making these, these huge choices, and making these changes, and taking chances. And I’m still,” he stopped and looked back over at Richie. “You’re not planning anything like that, right? Like, you’re not suddenly gonna get married, or write a new movie, or, or quit your job and drive across the country. Or, shit, buy a boat or something?”

“Uh, no,” Richie said, laying a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Nothing like that.” 

Eddie breathed a sigh of relief.

“But, um,” Richie started again, “I’ve been thinking about coming out. Professionally.” 

“Oh shit,” Eddie said, because _oh, shit._ “That. That is huge, Richie.”

“Eh, I guess,” Richie said. “It’s kind of a ‘make-or-break my career’ thing, but I’m kind of over it, or too tired to give too many shits. Guess killing an actual embodiment of fear puts some shit in perspective, y’know?”

“Yeah, I know.” Eddie didn’t know. 

“Steve, my, uh, my manager, he thinks I could use it to ‘revitalize’ my career which is a real fuckin’ sinister way to look at it. But I don’t think he’s wrong.” 

Eddie didn’t know what was the matter with himself. He wanted to be excited for him, for Beverly and Ben, for all of his friends, but there was something prickling at the back of his mind ( _unfair, unfair, unfair_ ). There was something he just didn’t get, still, and it was bound to drive him nuts, if it kept at it.

“Hey, Eddie?” Richie patted at his shoulder, drawing Eddie’s attention back to him. Eddie coughed.

“Yeah, man, that’s awesome. If you wanna do that, that’s great.” 

“Thanks, Eds, really,” he said, then frowned. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“I think I might just be tired,” Eddie said. Which was true, it was growing late and the combination of a big meal and warm coffee had him feeling groggy.

“You ready to head back?”

“Think so.”

“Do you mind if I—?”

“You can walk me back, Richie.”

They hugged again this time, in the lobby of Eddie’s building, Eddie holding Richie tight and not really wanting to let go. He was a perfect type of warm and Eddie didn’t want to pull himself away. But he did, and waved back at Richie as he left the lobby and headed back in the direction of his hotel. 

Eddie took the elevator, walked through his apartment into the guest bathroom, and threw up.

He, and Eddie swore this to himself, really was okay. 

* * *

“This really isn’t okay, Kaspbrak.” 

Eddie was in Craig’s office this time, sat in the uncomfortable faux-leather chair across from his desk. He couldn’t really believe he was there. He was getting a _talking to_ , and he hadn’t gotten a _talking to_ since his mother died. And here he was, all of forty-one years old and being talked down to by a man in a tie that Eddie knew came from Nordstrom Rack because he’d helped Craig’s wife pick it out as a birthday present. He’d been making “mistakes” at work lately. Little ones. Forgetting to save a spreadsheet, mistyping a number, not catching typos. The kind of little fuckups that were easy to make and a pain in the ass to fix. 

“I really am sorry, Craig,” Eddie said, shaking his head, his hands firmly cupping his own knees. “I don’t— I don’t know what’s come over me.” He didn’t. Well. Not exactly. It all tied back into this weird feeling, chafing in the back of his mind, a buzzing under his skin. How was he supposed to sit still, let alone focus, when his every pore was screaming at him that he needed to be up and somewhere, somewhere, somewhere? He didn’t know where, but it made caring about what Investor A wants with Bank B and what all that means for accounts, and lines of credit, and coverage by the FDIC-ouldn’t-fucking-care-less very, very difficult. 

Craig just frowned at him and Eddie wanted to yell. He’d been a model employee his whole career and now he was being lectured by a man with a southward facing office and a windowsill full of under-performing succulents. Craig sighed, loud, sounding so put-upon that Eddie wanted to point at him and shout, ask if it’s really that big of a fucking deal, if they really need the theatrics. 

“I know you’ve been through a lot lately,” Craig said and Eddie no longer wanted to yell, but to laugh. _Been through a lot lately_ , as if that could have even begun to cover it. Again, here he was, watching _Craig_ struggle to bring up the fact that Eddie almost died. Like that wasn’t what happened, like Eddie just had his own little hiccup in Maine and now, back in New York, back in his _life,_ he was being a whiny, lazy, sloppy pain-in-the-ass who just couldn’t get his shit back together.

But it was what happened. It did happen.

He _did_ almost fucking die. 

He almost died.

But that wasn’t quite right, huh. Was it.

He _had_ died, actually, that was the truth of it. He didn’t “almost die”. He almost didn’t live.

He felt his breath pick up, chest constricting, and he sat back in his seat as if he could will away his panic if he wanted it hard enough. He’d had a number of, of _these_ (asthma attacks, he’d thought, but of course he doesn’t having fucking asthma, now does he; panic attacks, he thought Grant might call them if Eddie ever bothered to tell his therapist about them) since coming back (home?) back (home?) back to New York, and while they were nothing new they never got any easier to go through. Wasn’t practice supposed to make perfect? Couldn’t he be perfect at panicking?

“Hey, Kaspbrak. Are you listening to me?” Craig snapped his fingers in front of Eddie’s face and Eddie wanted nothing more than to shoot forward and bite this asshole’s fingers. Who the fuck does that? What the fuck did he think Eddie was? A toddler? A dog? 

“Fuck you, dude,” Eddie said, not thinking before speaking and then trying not to think afterward. There wasn’t an immediate reaction from Craig. He didn’t yell, or ask what Eddie thought he was doing, but just froze, looking at Eddie like he didn’t know what just happened. That would make two of them, but Eddie decided he was just going to lean into it. 

“I’ve ‘been through a lot lately?’” Eddie asked, going full nasal in a poor, insulting imitation of Craig’s voice. “I got fucking skewered, Craig. Like all the way through, you get that, right? Like you get that? Do you? You get that I lost four liters of blood, right?”

“I,” Craig started but Eddie didn’t let him get much further than that.

“No, you don’t, do you? You know I flatlined three times?” Eddie continued, lifting from his chair, one hand supporting him with his cane and the other edging closer and closer to poking Craig _fucking_ Green in his spongy chest. “You know I went home for a funeral, yeah? One of my best friends died. Knew him since kindergarten. Dead out of nowhere. And while I drag my ass to bumfuck Maine to try and make sense of _that_ , I almost let It take me out too. But, yeah, it’s been a little rough, you could say that.” He stepped away from Craig before he did something more stupid (like spit at his feet, or flip him off, or just deck him, _god_ he wanted to, he wanted to, he wanted—) than the stupid thing he was already doing. 

“Right,” Eddie said, glancing at the hideous replication mid-century clock on the wall of the office. 1:07. “I’m taking a half-day.” He moved to leave, but stopped just as he got to the door, pulling it open but during back around to look at Craig. “Just. God, just go fuck yourself. You pick the reason.” Craig tried to speak again, anger becoming more apparent as he finally started to react to what was happening, but Eddie beat him to it.

“And move your fucking plants, man. They need direct sunlight or they’ll die, dipshit,” he spat, and slammed the door behind him.

* * *

He slammed through the front door of his apartment, really unsure, this time, how he actually got there. He could hear Myra knocking around in the kitchen and slipped passed the door to pace frantically in his bedroom. 

_What the fuck am I doing?_ he asked himself on a loop as he cycled around the space in front of his bed. Whether he meant that specifically or just in general, he didn’t know. God, he didn’t know. He felt sick.

Not just lost but adrift in thought, he tripped, cane catching on the ugly area rug that Myra’s parents had given them as a housewarming gift. He fell forward, catching himself with his hands on the surface of the dresser and sending a shock of pain through his back. 

He saw it then, resting on top of the dresser from when he’d last read through it the night previous. He couldn't help himself, after peeling himself off the bathroom floor, absent then of the warm and achingly nostalgic feeling he had wanted to cling to after his evening with Richie. He had it memorized, at this point. Could probably recite it verbatim, like a monologue, if he wanted, if that weren’t the most morbid thing he could think of. It made him sad, usually. Confused, always. But now. Now it made him angry.

Stan’s letter with its “be proud” and its “carry on” and its hypocritical, pseudo-inspirational, pretty-worded bullshit. It wasn’t inspiring, it was a fucking suicide note. And Stan could write that it wasn’t all he wanted, but that didn’t make it true. It was a note you wrote before you killed yourself, Stanley, that was a suicide note whether you liked it or not. He was a smart guy, Stan, he had to have known that. 

And the thing that got Eddie, the thing that really got him about the whole letter, what he had been rereading and holding onto and trying to follow for months? The Grade-A bullshit about “holding on” to your person worth holding onto. Well, he fucking tried, Stan, okay, and he was tired. He didn’t know what was worth holding onto (not his job, or his wife, or his life, apparently, because he’d tried to ease back into it, soak into its familiarity like slipping back into a pot of water that had slowly built to a boil while he sat in it, only to now find the water tepid and his skin still scalded while his burns did what burns do and _itched, and itched, and itched_ ) he didn’t think Stan ever knew either. He’d never known adult Stan and he had only a vague impression of what he actually looked like from a googled obituary not long after it happened, but he _knew_ Stan, the same way he knew everyone else. Intrinsically.

Stan had been married. And he sure did one hell of a job holding on to that, huh ( _unfair? unfair? unfair?)_. He couldn’t imagine how his wife must have felt. If she read the letters. She had to have been the one to send them out, after all, who else could have? And then.

Then what?

The tension thrumming in Eddie’s veins intensified, something buzzing in him like bees, caking his capillaries with dreadlike honey. His hands shook with it. Too quick to be careful, he pulled himself off of the dresser, pushed through the shock of pain, and scrambled around the room, shoving things into the bug-out bag he’d been instinctively building in the corner of his room, not letting himself slow down to fold, or fix, or organize. He zipped close the duffle bag and took off down the hall towards the door to their apartment, heading out, heading somewhere. He didn’t know what he was doing, but his body did, or at least acted like it, as it led him through the living room. He’d just about made it to the door, psyching himself up to actually open it when Myra popped her head around the corner to the kitchen.

“Eddie? I didn’t hear you get,” she started and just as soon stopped, eyes traveling up and down Eddie, her husband, standing and shaking with one hand on the doorknob and a stuffed duffel bag slung across the better of his shoulders. “Where are you going?” she asked, like he was supposed to know. 

“Nowhere,” he said, sounding like even he didn’t believe it. And he didn’t. His eyes didn’t leave Myra as she stepped fully out of the kitchen, arms at her sides, hands balled in tight little fists against her hips.

“Please,” she said. “Please don’t do this to me. You can’t just—” She took a breath and started again, voice more sure this time. “You can’t just run off. You can’t. Not again.”

He supposed he couldn’t. But he didn’t move from the door. 

“Let’s just,” Myra tried again, “let’s just talk it out, okay? Come to the kitchen and sit down. Have some chamomile, you’ve been so tired. Do that for me?” 

He supposed he could. Do that for her.

She turned back into the kitchen, expecting him to follow, and he did. He sat down at the kitchen table as she hummed an amelodic almost-song, digging through the cabinets for the tea he knew he wasn’t going to drink. 

“Myra,” he said, before she could get too far into the process. “Don’t.”

“Hm?” she turned back to him, wouldn’t look him in the eye, and Eddie knew then and there that she knew, better than him even, what was coming.

“Don’t make me the tea. I don’t like it. You know I don’t like it.”

“It helps you sleep.” She turned back to the cabinet and pulled down a mug.

“I don’t want to sleep,” he said. “I want to leave.” The mug clanked against the counter as Myra sat it down. She spun back around to face him.

“And go where?” she asked, and it didn’t matter that he didn’t have an answer because she soon spoke up again. “Back ‘home’?” One of her hands moved in the suggestion of an air quote. “Off with your friends? Who you’ve known forever, apparently, but never thought to mention to me in the twelve years I’ve known you?”

“Myra, I—“

“Off with that filthy comedian again, maybe? I saw his show with you and I didn’t like it. I told you I didn’t like it, and he’s got you going out with him, drinking and coming home late. It’s not good for you, I told you, you need rest to heal and your health is so sensitive as it is, it’s really—“

“Oh my god, Myra. Stop,” Eddie spoke again, louder this time, meaning it. “I’m not _sensitive_ , I’m not, I’m not made of fucking balsa wood. I’m healing and I am _fine._ And I’m, I’m forty-one goddamn years old, I don’t need you to, to, to,” he took a breath, “I don’t need you to mother me.”

“ _Mother you?_ What do you think I’m—?” She sighed and crossed her arms, staying stood before the cabinets. “I want you to be okay, I want you to be _safe_ , and it’s like—It’s like you’re going out of your way to make me worry. You won’t talk to me, won’t take care of yourself, won’t even let me do it for you when you won’t. And now what? You’re just up and leaving again to make me worry and worry and worry and worry again until I get a call that you’re in the hospital in, in fucking _Maine?_ You took off on your own once, Eddie, and it almost got you killed. Was that not good enough? You want to run out and do it again? Put me through that again? I don’t know what happened to you but,” she was tearing up now, bringing her hand to her face, preemptively ready to catch the tears, and all Eddie could think was _unfair unfair unfair_ but he couldn’t focus in on what it was. “I just, I don’t know who you are. Not anymore,” she finished. 

“You’re right,” he said, quiet, not waiting for a response before continuing. “You don’t know me. You really don’t. Not really. I’m not,” he sighed, “I’m not sick, Myra, and,” he cut her off as she moved to speak, “I know, I _know_ I told you I was. But I was wrong, and I only just remembered, got to remember, it’s all just more of my mother’s _bullshit._ ” He slammed his fist down on the tabletop, angry at all of it. The conversation, the situation, the fact that, again, it all boiled back down to the memories he didn’t get to keep. Funny, almost, how the fucking clown kept ruining his life even after it was dead. God _fucking_ forbid he get anything resembling solace out of all this. And why him? His friends (and he loved them, he loved them so much, he loved them, but) were getting along just fine, making miracles of the monkey wrenches that remembering threw into their lives (it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t—). He couldn’t be the only person who was fucked by all this, who _stayed_ fucked by all this. It. Wasn’t. Fair.

Myra jumped as his fist hit the table and its legs rocked from the force of it.

“Careful with the antique,” she worried. Eddie shoves the heels of his hands into his eyes, groaning.

“It’s not antique, Myra! It’s just old! My dad ordered from some catalog in 1970, it might as well be— flat pack. Might as well be flat pack! Is the IKEA bookshelf I bought in college antique? Is it?”

“This isn’t like you.”

“Isn’t it? Because honestly? This is the most ‘me’ I’ve felt in years. This ‘me’ you think you know just—he isn’t real, you get that right? And you can think that. You can. But that doesn’t make it true. This isn’t the, the, the goddamn _Secret,_ okay? That table isn’t an antique just because you want it to be. I don’t need you to take care of me just because that’s what you want to do. And, Christ, Myra, our marriage isn’t working just because you decided it will. Look at us, at this,” he gestured between the two of them, frantic. “In what universe is this what anyone wants out of a marriage? Is this what you want? Is it really? We don’t—we don’t even sleep together anymore, in, in either way. And I won’t lie to you, not about _this,_ but I don’t miss it.” At that he stood up and carefully pulled his bag back onto his shoulder, adjusted his grip on his cane. “I’m sorry. I just can’t do this anymore. I just,” he took a breath and headed back into the living room, back toward the door out of their apartment. “I just have to go.”

She followed after him out of the kitchen, saying as he reached for the door:

“Edward Kaspbrak, if you walk out that door right now, you’re not coming back.” He glanced back at her.

“I know,” he said, reaching for the doorknob.

“Wait, no, no,” she said, rushing up behind him. “I didn’t mean it, you know I hate it when we fight. Don’t you do this to me. Please, don’t. Just stay, we can work this out, get a better counselor. Please, just stay.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, refusing to look back at her, terrified that he’d get dragged back in again. “I really don’t think either of us deserves that.” He opened the door and forced himself out of it, speedwalking down the the hall.

* * *

Eddie wasn’t alright. It didn’t hit him, what he’d just done, until he was swinging into the front seat of his car and shoving his bag behind him into the backseat. 

He’d left. For good, apparently. He’d just opened a brand new can of worms and emptied it all over his already worm-infested floor. He could clean it up, or just, like, roll around in it a bit. Call an exterminator? God, he really didn’t know how to complete a metaphor. (God, he’d have to get a lawyer. He’d have to _pay_ for a lawyer. Thank fuck for the pre-nup, but even then, there was so much co-ownership in a decade of marriage. Maybe he could call Bev, she’d know the process. But she was still in the middle of her own divorce—oh _God he was getting divorced,_ that’s what he was doing, _why_ was this what he was doing, _was_ that what he was doing?) He didn’t know what he should do, not right now. Where he should go. 

But, he realized, he knew where he _wanted_ to go. Who he wanted to see. He closed his eyes and counted his breaths until he thought he could speak without much trouble, and then pulled out his phone, dialing and turning off the car’s bluetooth connection to keep the phone at his ear.

“Hey, miss me already?” Richie asked as he picked up the call,

“Will you do something for me?” Eddie didn’t answer Richie’s question, instead getting right to the matter at hand with his own. 

“Sure, Eds, of course,” Richie said after a second, seemingly without real hesitation. Eddie furrowed his brows. 

“You should, um, you should probably let me tell you what I want first,” Eddie warned, uneasy over Richie’s immediate allegiance to a yet-unknown cause. Eddie wasn’t sure Richie would be up for it if he knew the specifics of the threads of the idea tangling up in Eddie’s thoughts, but he did appreciate not having to try and explain, not yet. He still had to explain it to himself first.

“Hey. Anything for you. I mean it,” Richie said, soft, and Eddie could somehow hear the smallest of smiles in his voice. “I do draw the line at clown murder, though. Let’s keep that one a once per century event.” Eddie coughed out a laugh, surprising himself.

“So, what,” he said, “I can call you up in a hundred years and you’ll be, uh—“

“Down to down a clown? You betcha,” Richie said, with what Eddie kind of hoped was a faux, intense sincerity. “I’ll do what I can to still be kicking then, but you might wanna freeze me at peak physical form and defrost me when we get there.” Richie’s comic relief bit had been fun at first, but Eddie couldn’t help but circle back to the reason he had called in the first place.

“Rich,” he said, trying and failing to stop Richie’s mouth in its tracks.

“Oh, but if you do end up _Demolition Man_ -ing me, you gotta promise you’ll store my ice-cubed ass in a Planet Hollywood like they did with the Stallone prop. I don’t want anyone to be able to chow down on their shitty jalapeño poppers without seeing my taint.”

“Rich,” Eddie tried, and failed, again. Richie was doing that thing again, that thing he did.

“God, I haven’t seen that movie in forever. Sandy Bullock’s in that, right? Oh my god, and Rob Schneider, what the fuck? I ever tell you I met him at a party once? Huge asshole, as if that’s a surprise—” 

“Richie. Please,” Eddie barked out, finally getting Richie to shut up.

“Shit, yeah, sorry,” Richie apologized. He took a breath. “Lay it on me.” 

“Are you at your hotel?”

“Yeah, why, what’s up?”

“Can I come pick you up or something? There’s somewhere I need to go. And, um. I think I just left my wife.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, breaking my back to give myra some nuance: who the fuck is stephen king
> 
> holy shit folks this one was longer than i'd, uh, anticipated (and took long, whoops?)
> 
> eddie's plant callout is directed at myself, a dumbass with a *north* facing office and a windowsill full of underperforming succulents
> 
> thanks for reading, part three is in the works xx


	3. Act 3: The Rise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heya folks
> 
> again, general tw/cw for discussion of a canon suicide  
> and a general heads up for lots of discussion of grief

The thing they can’t tell you about almost dying?

What you’re supposed to do next.

After you know, both inside and out of you, deep in your bones and against the soft of your skin, just how close you were to losing all of it. After you’ve made it through all of that, when you’re searching for a way forward, when you don’t know where to go. That’s it. It’s just you, alone, standing at the start of a path, a bend in a row, the mouth of a cave and a wall to your back. 

You’d like a map, of course, to point the way, give you coordinates and directions, a definite destination. But there isn’t one. It’s uncharted territory, dipshit, that’s the point. No one else has gone quite this way before. No one has done it exactly like anyone else. They’ve definitely haven’t done it exactly like you. Life is a highway, or a winding road, or whatever song you wanna connect to it.

Congrats, man, you made it this far. But that’s it. Stop lying in your unfilled grave and get the fuck to it.

* * *

Richie wasn’t talking and, for once, Eddie wasn’t happy about it. Granted, Eddie himself wasn’t saying anything either, but he’d been kind of banking on Richie filling the silence with, like, anything. 

But he didn’t.

Instead, he sat on the other bed of their shitty motel room, scrolling through his phone, flipping through channels on the shitty tube television, or, occasionally, glancing over at Eddie who could feel his gaze on him like the heat of a spotlight glaring between the two beds. 

Richie hadn’t started out that way, of course. When Eddie pulled up to his Manhattan hotel, Richie had thrown himself into the passenger seat, an almost indecipherable series of questions boiling over out of his throat. He’d slowed down, once he realized Eddie wasn’t going to say anything back, and had asked more directly:

“Is this, uh, is this the episode you thought you were having?”

“Think so.”

“Ah. Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’ll let you know, Rich.”

“Got it.”

He kept talking, at that point, filling Eddie in on any and everything, taking about new bits he was writing, talking about a terrible brunch experience he and Bill had had. 

He talked as Eddie drove through the city, off the island of Manhattan, and straight into the long term parking at LaGuardia. 

“No offense to your city or, uh, anything, but this is an ugly as shit airport, right? Like O’Hare looks like a fuckin’ future mall, yeah? While LaGuardia looks like—it looks like someone stapled a bunch of old high schools together.” 

Eddie didn’t answer and Richie followed after him, grabbing at the sleeve of his jacket.

“Hey, no, really. Are you going to tell me where we’re going? I’m with you on this, alright? But you gotta fill me in, like, should I have grabbed my passport or what?” He laughed, openly nervous and Eddie felt guilty over it. Unfair. He took that new guilt and stacked it on top of the ceaseless pile of guilt squatting in the back of his mind. 

He pulled Richie over to a bench and sat down with him. He grabbed onto Richie’s wrists, holding them, soft, because he needed something to hold. He told him where he wanted to go. Richie asked him if he was sure and, when Eddie nodded, firm, he nodded back.

“Alright, then,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

Eddie’s shaky veneer of calm peeled away totally once they actually boarded the plane and were in the air. No longer focused on driving, or buying tickets, or hightailing it through security, Eddie had nothing to distract him from the cavalcade of piss poor decisions he’d spent the last few hours making. He was alone with his thoughts. And Richie, of course, sitting poor man’s business class with him on their otherwise full plane. Small blessings, or something like that. Tiny, tiny blessings. Fucking minuscule blessings.

Glad as Eddie was to have him with him on this, he didn’t know why Richie was, well, _with him_ on this. It was pretty high up on the list of batshit decisions Eddie had made in his life. Shit, it was pretty high up on the list of batshit decisions he’d made that day. But still, there was Richie, somehow dozing off, body slipping sideways into the miracle seat between them in an unconscious effort to stretch out his body. Eddie knew Richie had to have anything better to be doing than this, than playing chaperone to Eddie’s sudden flight from New York. He had to have—he had—

Wait. Shit. Wait.

Eddie slapped at Richie’s shoulder with the back of his hand, jostling him awake.

“I’m up, I’m up,” Richie said, rolling his shoulders. He turned his head to look at Eddie but didn’t sit up. “Hey.”

“Richie,” Eddie stage whispered at him.

“Yes?”

“What are you doing? Don’t you— you have— shit—”

“I have shit?” Eddie didn’t laugh but he didn’t think Richie expected him to.

“Yes, you have shit. You have your, your _thing_ , your fucking New York thing.” Richie sat up at this, rubbing at his eyes like a still-sleepy kindergartner post-naptime. 

“Ah, shit,” he said, “no, Eds, I—I don’t,” he groaned. “I don’t have a, a _thing._ ” Eddie stared at him across their row of seats.

“You said you had a thing.”

“I,” Richie started, stopped, and then started again. “We’re fucking worried about you, man. All of us.”

“The fuck, Richie? Why?”

“Dude. You called everyone—out of the blue, apparently, have you not been talking to anyone?” He looked at Eddie for a response, but he wasn’t going to get one. “You call to ask if we’ve been crying a lot, like that’s something people just do. The optics on that, man? They’re bad.”

“Mhm.” Eddie knew he was right, but he didn't need him to point it out, he _knew_.

“So, I, uh, I said I’d come check up on you. Make sure you weren’t gonna pull a Stan on us.” Eddie didn’t say anything, just sat with his arms crossed, looking at Richie. “I’m sorry,” Richie said. “That wasn’t funny.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie repeated.

“I know.” Eddie leaned back into his seat, unfolding his arms. “I don’t need you guys to worry about me. I guess it’s really fuckin’ hard to believe, but I can take care of myself.”

“We don’t— god, of course you can take care of yourself. You just don’t—you,” Richie shrugged, “you don’t have to,” he finished, but something sparked across his face and he spoke again. “I mean, more power to you, I guess. But you don’t gotta go it alone if you don’t want to.” 

Eddie didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything at all. He just nodded and nudged at Richie with his shoulder and Richie nudged back and they were quiet.

* * *

Eddie was tired.

Eddie was really fucking tired.

He couldn’t exactly remember when the last time he slept was and, beyond that, he definitely couldn’t remember the last time he had a sleep that did much of anything other than pass the time. 

He didn’t sleep on the first flight, even as Richie drifted back off beside him. He didn’t sleep during their ninety minute layover in Chicago, where his time was spent tracking down their gate and watching Richie pick at a plate of tacos at the airport Frontera while refusing to eat anything himself. He didn’t sleep once they got on their next flight, even after Richie bought and made him drink a vodka sprite.

“Vodka sprite?” Eddie had asked, breaking the weird silence that had settled over them. “What, am I rushing a sorority?” Richie shoved the drink into his hand and, despite his questions, Eddie grabbed onto it.

“I don’t know, are you? You couldn’t handle Greek life, you don’t have the constitution,” Richie teased, waving Eddie off when he tried to get in a _the fuck does that mean._ “It’s easy to drink quick. Before the flight attendant snatches it back so we can take off. Now slammajam that shit and calm the fuck down.”

Eddie did not calm down. Not when the plane took off, not when it came safely back down again, not on their trek through the airport, not when renting themselves a car, and not when they checked into the first motel they could find in the early hours of the morning once they finally left Atlanta International Airport. 

And Eddie was tired and Richie was being weird and quiet and, since Richie was being weird, Eddie felt weird. Uncomfortable, twitchy, and it didn’t matter how tired he was or how much melatonin he popped, he couldn’t do much more than lay down and meet the heinous gaze of the popcorn ceiling, illuminated by the dull bedside table lamp Richie hadn’t turned off after giving up on the television. Eddie had popcorn ceilings at home and he hated them but (it wouldn’t have been worth it to go through the building management to look into changing them) Myra said she thought they were charming, whatever the fuck that meant, but all the little bumps made Eddie’s skin crawl to look at them. 

Eddie groaned and threw his head back against his pillow, the sudden sound rousing Richie from his light sleep.

“Wha-?” Richie mumbled, lifting his head to see whatever it was Eddie was doing. Eddie was glad it was dim in the room and Richie had taken his glasses off because Eddie was pretty sure he looked like he was on the verge of having a tantrum. It looked that way because he was very much on the verge of having a tantrum. 

“Just—” Eddie tried, “fuckin’— fuckin’ popcorn ceilings, man.” He could feel, again, Richie looking at him and he glanced back over to make sure. Richie held his gaze, as best he could when half-asleep and half-seeing, and Eddie fought to maintain the eye contact and not focus on easier targets, such as the wall behind Richie, his enormous forehead, or his sleep tousled hair (or what remained of it, it was a shame what was happening to Richie’s hairline, but Dr. Tozier had been balding at some point, if Eddie remembered correctly, so it wasn’t a big stretch to think Richie might just have a touch of that curse). Eddie won, in the end (if it really ever were a competition or just Eddie deciding it was), when Richie moved his head to squint upwards at the ceiling, trying to take it in without grabbing his glasses. He could see it well enough, apparently, because he flopped back down into his pillow.

“Yeah, Eds,” he said. “Gross ceiling. Go the fuck to sleep.”

* * *

A handful of hours later, after the sun rose and so did they, Eddie and Richie left the motel and set out on what they came there for. Or, what Eddie had come there for, because while Richie was on board, Eddie knew that he was the one that brought Richie into this. He was the one who recruited him onto this sad sack mission that Eddie couldn’t help but feel was doomed from the start. There was no real plan, just a need to be somewhere, doing something. And, boy oh boy, they were somewhere about to do something.

GPS made tracking the house down simple, and it wasn’t long before Eddie pulled the rental car to a stop just down the street, but still in view of the charming bungalow-style house, with its window boxes and collection of bird feeders hanging from the ancient magnolia tree in the front yard. 

Eddie felt sick. He turned off the car and sat still, not moving to even undo his seatbelt because he felt sick. Richie cleared his throat and Eddie did not move to look at him because he felt sick. 

“I feel sick,” he said, instead, because he felt sick. He did glance over as he heard the click of the passenger side seatbelt. Richie was looking at him, body turned to face him as much as was possible from his seat. 

“We don’t have to,” he said. “But I think we want to.”

“Do you?” Eddie asked.

“Want to? I thought so. Think so. Might need to. I don’t know, but we’re here.” Richie leaned forward to take in the house, eyes running over the slightly too long grass and the empty flower beds. “That her car?” he asked, gesturing to the stormy blue sedan in the driveway.

“Whose else would it be?” Eddie ran his hands down his face. “Shit. We should have called. We should have called ahead.” He didn’t look at Richie.

“Probably. But we only have the address, so. Should we have called Bill, too, do you think?”

“Probably,” Eddie sighed. “He might have wanted to be here. Bill knew him as long as we did, but,” he trailed off. He still didn’t look at Richie.

“He doesn’t need it.” Not like they did. Not like Eddie, at least, did. Because Bill was fine. More than fine, with his movies, and his books, and his on-the-mend marriage. He didn’t need it to build him up and he didn’t need it to break him down. Eddie didn’t know what he needed from it, just that he did.

“Yeah.”

“You ready?” Richie asked, and Eddie finally turned to look at him, barking a laugh.

“Not at all.”

“Me neither. Let’s move it before someone calls the cops.”

Eddie counted his steps from the car to the front door, measuring and keeping in time the movement of his legs with Richie’s. An effort to calm down, or just distract himself from the moment, from the coming moments. 

They weren’t moving fast but they also weren’t going far, so it wasn’t more than a minute before they made their way across the walkway and stepped up to the front door. Richie, still by his side, looked over to Eddie, eyebrows raised in question. Eddie took a breath, nodded at him and, fingers shaking, pressed the doorbell.

He could hear the chime of it echoing through the house from the outside. The clanging, louder than he’d expected, much louder than the staticky buzzer of the (his?) apartment (his?) back (his?) in New York, rattled him, leaving him worried that this was a mistake and the house itself had set off klaxons to warn him away. 

He didn’t run, though. He stayed stood on the front steps, Richie at his side. He wasn’t confident, and, by the way Richie was biting at a scar on one of his knuckles, he didn’t think Richie was all that confident about it either. But, still, they didn’t move. They were there, shoulder to shoulder.

Eddie supposed he didn’t need anyone to make him brave, but having someone by his side, regardless of that, didn’t hurt. 

After a long minute spent at the door, Eddie could hear shuffling on the other side, followed by a click as the door was pulled open.

Eddie realized he hadn’t rehearsed what to say. What to ask. What to even say that he wanted. Why hadn’t he done that? Did he think they were just going to wing it? Eddie was still trying to wrack his brain for something to say, (something _appropriate_ to say, what could possibly be appropriate to say?) when Richie did was he always did and talked.

“Hey,” he greeted, and Eddie grimaced at the informality of it all. “Patricia Uris? You don’t know us but, um, we were friends with your husband. Could we talk?”

* * *

Eddie didn’t know why she let them into her house, but she did. She looked at them standing there and stepped back, gesturing to them to follow her inside. As she led them to a bright but comfortable, little sitting room, Eddie remembered to actually introduce himself and Richie to her and, while she did not turn around, she hummed in acknowledgement.

“Right,” she said. “From the letters.” She took a seat in an armchair across from the couch where she had directed the two of them to sit, and asked them to please call her Patty. 

“I thought you must have been the one to send them out,” Eddie admitted, vague nausea still rolling through his stomach. He almost couldn’t look at her, sitting across from him like there wasn’t something horribly incorrect about it, seeming put-together but tired, her face not gaunt but getting there.

“He didn’t really find the time to do it himself,” she said, and shook her head gently. “It is nice to meet you. The letters. I just, I did wonder who you were.” She sighed and rubbed at her eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t have it in me today to dance around this. How exactly did you know Stanley? He’d never mentioned you. Not until.”

“We grew up together,” Richie said. “He was my best friend.”

“We all were,” Eddie said. “The letters. We were all together as kids, but, um. Rich and me—and our other friend, uh, Bill, y’know, William Denbrough?—we knew Stan the longest. Same kindergarten class.”

“Ms. Summers,” Richie said, grinning. “She was the worst.” Eddie scoffed, nudging his shoulder into Richie’s. 

“You just thought she was the worst because she wouldn’t let you draw on your desk and made you actually participate in nap time,” he said.

“Oh, says the kid who never got his behavior light switched past yellow.”

“No, no, both Bill and me got red once because of something you dragged me into and even Stan got yellow by association.”

“Wait. Shit. Yeah, I did do that didn’t I? God, he was so pissed. He still played with me but insisted on keeping, like, ten feet away at all times.”

“He never really talked about where he grew up,” Patty said, drawing their attention back to where she was watching them from across the coffee table, strewn with photography and art books and boxes of jigsaw puzzles. “He didn’t,” she started, pausing for a moment. “He’d always said his childhood was fuzzy for him. Could never quite remember it. I knew him inside and out, and him me. But there was always,” she stopped and took a breath. “I felt like I always knew that something had to have happened to him. And that either he didn’t remember or just didn’t want me to know. Or both, maybe, I don’t know.” She looked up at them. “We all have secrets, don’t we? Even if we don’t know that it’s a secret we’re keeping. We all have things. But,” she stopped to think again. “Could you tell me, or, I suppose, would tell me? If something happened to him?”

Eddie felt Richie shift beside him, sitting close enough to feel the fabric of Richie’s shirt sleeve drag against Eddie’s own, and glanced over to meet his eyes. Eddie started to nod, slow, and Richie joined.

“There was,” Richie said. “Something happened to all of us.” There wasn’t a change in expression on Patty’s face, and Eddie guessed that she really must have been able to recognize at least that much in Stan. He wondered if anyone had ever been able to see it in him. 

“And I don’t suppose you could tell me.”

“I don’t know if you’d believe it.”

“I suppose not,” she said, and there was something else there, below it all, Eddie could hear. 

“Did you read them?” Eddie asked. Patty looked at him, face unreadable. “The letters?” he clarified.

“No,” she said. “They weren’t addressed to me.” She looked down, fiddling with her fingers. “I’m sorry, I don’t really know why you’re here.”

“Just,” Richie spoke up, and Eddie didn’t know what could possibly have to say, because Eddie didn’t know why they were here (it was his plan, it was, as much as just getting up and going could ever be a plan, but she didn’t want them here, she obviously didn’t want them here, how could she possibly want them here, but Richie had something to say, he at least had something—). “We never got to know Stan as an adult. We never got to see that part of him, but you—” Patty raised her hand, signaling him to stop.

“I’m not my husband. And I can’t— I can’t be your, your window into who he was. I can’t do that for you. If I even wanted to, I don’t think. Right now, no.”

“That’s not what I—”

“If you’re looking for some kind of insight into why he did this, I can’t help you. Because I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t need the stomachache.” Eddie felt sick all over again, feeling that this was a mistake. It had to be a mistake. Here they were, sat in front of the wife—no, no, that’s not right—in front of the _widow_ of a friend they didn’t remember a year ago. But the two of them didn’t remember each other a year ago either.

The worst of it, as Eddie let himself consider it, was that they weren’t here for answers to why Stan did what he did. They didn’t need answers. They (the seven of them, Stan included, he was a part of this, like it or not he was a part of this) knew better than anyone why it went down like it did, and now they (Eddie and Richie specifically, this time, because they were the ones on this couch in this house in the life of this woman they had just met) had to sit in front of Patricia Uris and not know what it was they wanted from her outside of grasping at whatever bits of Stan that wouldn’t slip out of their tear and blood slicked fingers. Closure, maybe, but Eddie wasn’t sure for or from who or what, but he knew Patricia Uris was the last person he should have been asking. 

Unfair. Unfair. Unfair.

“My husband made his choice, and I know that I’ll never know why. So, no, I don’t understand it. I’ll never get it. Nothing will make me understand. But I’m handling it because I have to handle it. What else am I supposed to do? I still have to get up and feed the birds. Feed myself. Go to work. My life doesn’t end just because his did. I’m not letting it. I won’t let it. And not because that’s what he would want but because it’s what I do want.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, fingers tapping on the handle of his cane, and embarrassed for the both of them. They shouldn’t have come here, they shouldn’t have come here, he shouldn’t have— “We shouldn’t have—”

“No, no,” Patty cut him off, gesturing at him. “I appreciate the visit. I do. I’m glad you loved my husband. I’m glad he had more people out there loving him than I could ever have known. But there’s so much of it, and I know it hurts you too, I know, I know, but it’s not the same. But there’s just, there’s just—” 

“Shit, Eds is right. We’re sorry, we shouldn’t have—” Richie tried to move to get up and Eddie wanted to follow, to do something, but, again, Patty cut them off.

“I had all these dishes to do, right after,” she said. “Because someone you love dies and your life shatters and everyone you know will bring you casseroles for a month. Then you wash the dishes in the sink he picked out and you give them back. And that’s it for them. Their dish is back, and they’ve helped, and my husband is still dead, but their dish is back, so they can move on. They get to forget.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, although he didn’t know what exactly he was apologizing for, just that he felt like he was sorry for something. All of it, maybe. There was a lot to be sorry about, generally, these days. Patty shook her head at him.

“No, no, it’s—not fine, but,” she frowned. “I could get you, I don’t know, pictures? Would you like pictures of him? I could make copies, or.” 

“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine,” Richie said. “I could give you my address. Or my email address? However you want to do it? I don’t know.”

“Right, yes,” Patty nodded, brows furrowed. “Just, both, I think? Is that alright?”

“Of course,” Eddie spoke up, himself nodding this time. “I can give you my, um, my email address.” Eddie didn’t have a physical address anymore did he? Did he? It was his name on the lease, but he had been the one who left, and the idea of even stepping foot back into the building didn’t feel right. 

They exchanged information and, afterwards, the three of them didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. Patty hadn’t asked them to leave, but she hadn’t asked them to stick around, so Eddie thought it might be best that they take off. He didn’t know if they got what they came here for, but he also didn’t know what they came here for. So it fuckin’ goes, huh. 

Richie excused himself to use the restroom before they left, and Patty pointed to a door down the hallway. Eddie watched Richie hesitate when he made it to the door, hand frozen on the knob.

“Don’t worry,” Patty called after him. “It wasn’t that one.” Eddie didn’t know if it was supposed to be funny or not, but Patty laughed like it was. He tried to catch her eye to send a polite smile her way, but she wouldn’t look at him. 

Richie wasn’t long in the bathroom, and they were soon making uncomfortable goodbyes and offering further condolences on their way out of the house. 

Just before Patty could shut the door, Eddie stopped, grabbing for the knob to hold the door in place.

“Sorry,” he said, again. She looked at him, waiting. It hurt, looking at her, but he willed himself not to look away.

“We won’t forget, Patty,” he said. “We’re not going to forget about it.” He didn’t say it was a promise, but that didn’t make it not one. Eddie had lost too much, forgotten too much for too long. Eddie would do anything he could to remember everything that had been taken from him. It was a long list, made up of events, places, people. And Stan was on that list. Near the top, situated between six other people that, if Eddie had his way (for once, just for once, let him have something, let him have this, let him have this, let him have—), he would never, ever forget again. He wanted Patricia Uris to know that. The he, that he and Richie, that they weren’t just another couple (another, another what, another, another what, stupid, another, what, what—) of people offering empty words and trays of tater-tot casserole. They would remember Stan. They would remember her, too. He hoped she’d let them.

“Thanks,” she said, looking between the two of them, and shut the door. 

Richie asked him, once they were back sitting in the rental car, whether Eddie felt any better. Eddie fiddled with the keys but couldn’t get himself to put them in the ignition. He didn’t say anything. Richie sighed.

“Yeah, me neither.”

* * *

He was nauseous but hadn’t eaten and knew that couldn’t have been helping, so he let Richie drag him to the first restaurant they found with a decent health rating that would also serve them alcohol at ten in the morning. 

It had been a solid decade since Eddie had been inside a chain steakhouse (work Christmas party, embarrassing, even then he’d had a salad and didn’t RSVP the next year), but it was open and had a bartender on shift so he sat fiddling with a straw wrapper and feeling much too small in a much too large six person booth with Richie across from him, slathering cinnamon butter onto a roll while sitting cross-legged at the table like some kind of maniac. Eddie couldn’t quite look at him. He didn’t know what Richie was thinking, or feeling (which made plenty of sense, Eddie wasn’t even sure how he was feeling himself; he’d once thought that was some pretty base-level stuff, but he’d proven that one wrong time and time again over the last six months, go fucking figure), and he didn’t really want to know, not yet, so he focused on his straw wrapper. On the grain of the table. On the horrifying dessert menu. 

Their server brought their drinks, her hands shaking a bit as she sat them down, spilling part of one of their (hopefully strong, please, god, let it be strong) cheesily named cocktails onto the table. She either didn’t notice she’d done it, or hadn’t cared, because she turned around and headed back towards the bar without acknowledging it. Eddie took this distraction as a gift, grabbing at napkins to dab at the spill and ignore Richie, and Richie’s face, and the knowledge that if he looked at Richie’s face then it would have something to say. Richie waited surprisingly patiently for him to finish his clean-up job and carefully fold the soiled napkin into a neat, blue rectangle before speaking up.

“Bread’s good,” he said, and Eddie didn’t say anything.

“You think they make these in-house or they’re frozen?” Eddie didn’t say anything.

“I worked at a, uh, a shitty little steakhouse right out of college, right? And we had these rolls. Definitely frozen. Wherever we got them had to be real gross, ‘cause we’d find flies in a couple of them, like, monthly.” Eddie didn’t say anything.

“But, uh, I can crack all of them open, give them a good search for unwanted fillings before you eat any.” Eddie didn’t—

“You should probably eat one,” Richie finished. Eddie looked up at him, abandoning his miniature pile of paper garbage, ready to shout about something, something, just to ask Richie to shut up, to leave him alone. But.

But.

Eddie’s voice died in his throat as he saw the expression on Richie’s face. He was smiling, but only by definition, only in that the corners of his mouth were more-or-less raised and some of his teeth were more-or-less showing. It didn’t just not reach his eyes. It didn’t reach any part of his face. But his eyes, his eyes especially. Eddie wanted to hold him down (and then? and then? why would he—) and compare swatches of both their dark circles, to see who, now, was winning. They hadn’t been that dark before, at the diner, at the park, when Eddie had looked into them, Richie idly wiping the condensation off his glasses with the hem of his shirt. They’d been there, he’d noticed, but not like this. 

Eddie hadn’t seen himself since that morning in the motel bathroom, looking, he imagined, more corpse-like than he had during any of the minutes he had actually been dead, peering back at a sad funhouse version of himself behind the toothpaste splatters that Richie had already left on the mirror.

“Hey,” Richie said. He put down his roll.

“Hey,” Eddie answered. He picked one up. He set it down on the small appetizer plate in front of him, carefully slicing it and spreading a thin layer of cinnamon butter over one of the halves. He glanced back up at Richie as he took a bite, catching Richie staring right at him. 

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and then kept talking anyway. “I’m just, like, never going to get over you eating actual food. Look at you. Gluten and butter and sugar. You wanna get aspartame up in the mix? You can have a sip of my Diet Coke.” Richie gestured one of his glasses towards Eddie, in offer. 

Eddie scowled at him, still taking a bite of his roll. It was really fucking good. He couldn’t help but let out a small sigh as the taste of sweet butter and yeasty carbs hit his tongue. Jesus _fuck,_ what kind of life had he been living where one bite of a shitty dinner roll had him like this? He dared glance back up at Richie, seeing the completely expected shit-eating grin on his face.

“Well, shit, Eds, if I knew I’d be getting dinner and a show I’d have dragged you to one of these months ago. Talk about ‘no rules, just right,’” he said, joking, obviously (obviously, obviously, _obviously_ he was joking), but his face was still worn and his smile, big as it may have been, big as it always was, felt false and strange. He was sad, and he was tired, and Eddie had dragged him halfway across the country to pester a grieving woman (unfair, unfair of him, to ask this of Richie, unfair, unfair). “I’d say we should share one of those big onion things, but I’m worried you’ll get too into it. I’m down to lick ranch off your chest anytime, but I don’t think our server gets paid enough to, uh, to put up with that.”

Richie was joking and laughing because that’s what he did, and Eddie was thankful for it, more or less. Thankful for it being a scrap of normalcy in this weird-ass mess he had built for himself. He’d willfully torpedoed his own life and pulled out a hammer to finish off the rest, while bringing Richie along after him to provide running commentary with all the finesse and sensitivity of a Catskills comedian. It didn’t feel right, but it felt okay, so he was going to let it. For now, at least.

They ate. Eddie, realizing just how hungry he had been once his food was in front of him, wasted no time in shoveling steak and potatoes into his mouth, sipping at his over-sweet cocktail, and downing glasses of water like it was his fucking job. Richie kept a constant stream of conversation going throughout the meal, even as it became more and more one-sided as Eddie became distracted by eating. He talked as they finished, as he insisted on paying the bill, as he insisted on driving them back to the motel because he insisted Eddie try and nap. Even then, he talked for half of the drive, droning on and on as Eddie sat in the passenger seat. Eddie noticed every time that Richie glanced back over at him, as he checked in on him every couple of minutes and generally did a piss-poor job at watching the road. Like if he didn’t have his eyes on Eddie at all times, he’d disappear. Which was stupid, Eddie wasn’t about to tuck and roll his way out of the car as they made their way down the highway. The sixth or seventh time that Eddie caught him looking, he’d had about enough.

“What?” he asked. 

“Hm?”

“Ugh, don’t,” he groaned, “don’t _‘hmm?’_ like you don’t know what you’re doing. What is it? What?”

“Dude, what?”

“You keep— you, you keep _looking_ at me.” Eddie didn’t know why this made him so angry, or if he even was angry. But he was definitely feeling something, and a lot of it at that. 

“Just can’t get enough of that cute little face, Eddie, baby.” Richie tapped his hands along the top of the steering wheel and sighed. “I kind of hoped you’d take this opportunity to sleep.”

“Why are you here?”

“I—well. I—well. Well, uh, forty-some years ago Maggie Tozier forgot that antibiotics—”

“No, knock it off with the obtuse bullshit. I’m not fucking around. Why are you here, Richie? Why did you follow me _here_?” Eddie watched as Richie lifted a hand from the wheel to run through his own hair, groaning.

“Fine, okay, let’s do—” Richie glanced at the side mirror and pulled the car to the side of the highway, leaving just enough space between them and the lane to be safe but still make Eddie nervous. “Let’s do this.” He threw the car in park and leaned back in his seat, turning to face Eddie as well as he could while still buckled into the driver’s seat. “Alrighty. Tell me, Eddie, why you think I’m here. Because it’s not me playing wellness check with you. I didn’t draw a fucking short straw to come—come babysit you. Obviously. I mean, _fuck,_ if I was supposed to be your keeper I wouldn’t have let us end up in Georgia.”

“No, you just tagged along with me to help torment a widow for fucking fun.”

“Okay, now you’re the one being goddamn obtuse. I wanted to come here. I wanted to see Patty, I’ve told you this. Hell, I probably gave you the idea. Should we have done it? I don’t know. Differently? Probably. At least. I don’t know.” Richie threw his hands into the air stiffly. “But don’t you think, not for a fucking minute, that I’m not here because I want to be. Too many places, I’ve been too many places just because I had to be there and I’m done with that shit. Not anymore. This—this _whatever_ it is, it isn’t an obligation, alright? I need to know you’re hearing me, Eddie, because I need you to know this. I want to be here. With you. Even if it fucking sucks.”

“Oh, fuck you, man, ‘ _even if it sucks_ .’ Of course it fucking sucks, it all fucking sucks. Everything fucking sucks, and it always has, and I just didn’t fucking know because I used to be good at it. At not noticing the, the, the all of it. And, you know what? _I_ fucking suck, because I’m not like you, Rich, I didn’t come here to check on Patty, make sure she’s ‘okay’ or whatever the hell that means. I just wanted to know that someone got more fucked by all this than I did, because everyone else is just killing it, okay? And she is worse off than me, and I don’t feel better, it didn’t fix a goddamn thing, and I feel like a piece of shit, okay?”

“Jesus, Eds.”

“Because I tried to, I don’t even know, tried to what? Use her to make me get it through my head that it’s not that bad? That, hey, my life’s been shit the whole time but at least the love my life isn’t dead right? Whoever that is, because it sure as fuck isn’t my wife. Like at least I didn’t have to find, like, _you_ , cold in a bathtub. Or, or—” He trailed off and pressed the back of his head into the headrest, as if the pressure could relieve any of what he was feeling. It was quiet, for a moment, as Eddie caught his breath before Richie spoke up, carefully quiet. 

“The deadlights. What I saw, I’m—I’m gonna tell you. And I don’t, I don’t want you to say anything about it when I’m done. Not a fucking word,” he said, in near whisper.

Eddie didn’t know what to say to that, didn’t know if there was anything that could be said to that. So he kept quiet as Richie began to speak, his voice more shaky and less sure than Eddie had ever heard it.

“Everything in there was real,” Richie explained.

“No, no it wasn’t.” Richie glared at him, and Eddie stopped his protest.

“It was. It’s not real now, but it was. While I was in there, it was real. I am telling you this because it’s true.” He glanced at Eddie as if he expected him to interrupt again, but Eddie knew better this time. Wanted better. Richie dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. “You died, Eddie. Saving me, it got you. Really got you. No close calls. No miracles. Just. The blood was—was unreal. In your mouth, and in my mouth, and my face, and my shirt, and that _claw_ , just, it was all I could see. That was how I knew, after, that what really happened was going to be different. The blood was different. But before, it was, it was—” Richie stopped and sighed. “You were on the floor, and It was down, and It was dead, but so were you so it didn’t matter.” Richie chuckled, but there wasn’t anything funny. “Nothing mattered at that point, turns out. ‘Cause our friends left you and dragged me out because they couldn’t even give me the fucking dignity of choosing when and how I die, and you got buried and I wanted nothing more than to be next to you, choking. I don’t have to guess at it, how Patty feels, losing a love like that. Because I know what it’s like. It made sure of that.” 

Eddie’s heart stuttered, as he took in what Richie said. He couldn’t possibly mean—but what if—what would that even—but how did Eddie not—how did he not tell— 

“Rich.” 

“Not a word.” 

“That’s not fair. That’s not fucking fair, you can’t just drop something like that on me and expect me not to want to talk about it.”

“Fine. What?” Eddie didn’t know. He had no clue what he wanted to say about all _that._ He just knew he wanted to say something. And oh, wasn’t that the fuckin’ rub? Wasn’t that the story of his half-assed life? Little Eddie Kaspbrak, per the usual, knowing he should be doing something but standing stock-still and stupid all the same. So it fucking goes. 

“You, uh, you love me?” Richie didn’t respond, but he also wouldn’t look at him, so Eddie had his answer. “I—I don’t know what to say.”

“Then don’t. Say anything. Like I fucking asked.” Eddie listened this time, sitting silent and sick from it the whole rest of the drive back to their motel.

“I just thought,” Richie started as they pulled into the parking lot, and Eddie should have known Richie wouldn’t have been able to stick with silence, even if it were at his own request. “I mean, I wanted you to know. You’re not the only one fucked up by this.” He parked the car and threw open the driver’s side door. Eddie followed suit, bolting out of his seat and around the car to catch Richie as he stood up and pull him into a crushing hug. Richie hugged back, tight, like he was supposed to, like it was alright.

Eddie decided he wouldn’t talk about it.

There’s a lot they can’t tell you about the way forward. 

You’re the one making the map. 

Sometimes you get lost.

* * *

Eddie wasn’t alright and that was okay. And Richie was in love with him and that was also, probably, okay.

Back in New York, things weren’t normal because he was living out of suitcases in a hotel and had regular, lengthy phone calls with his lawyer. But, he somehow hadn’t lost his job. There were threads, at least, then, for him to grab and hold himself up with. Threads to knit back together like the scarves his aunt always made, that his mother would pile upon him in layers and layers anytime the mercury dropped below fifty. Or something like that. 

It had been a week and he was working. Craig would go out of his way to not see him, but he was working, so it was fine, and Richie was in love with him.

He’d seen Grant again, perfectly on time at their scheduled appointment, and didn’t talk about Myra, or Patty, or Richie, or anything other than work. Work was normal, so work was safe to talk about. Work hadn’t really changed, so he talked about work and went home (to the hotel, but it was home for now, until he got his shit and accounts in order and tried his hand at pre-divorce apartment hunting, he really should call Bev about how that worked) and Richie was in love with him.

He and Richie hadn’t talked. Not about the conversation on the side of the road, as promised, but also not about anything else, either. Which hadn’t been promised, and Eddie was antsy over it, and Richie was in love with him.

Eddie wasn’t allowed to talk about it, but it didn’t stop him from thinking about it. At work, on his commute, at lunch, at dinner, on the phone with his lawyer. He thought about it in the shower once, but then thought too hard and had to stop. He thought about it before he went to sleep, and when he woke up, and when he stared at his phone urging Richie, who was in love with him, to give him a fucking call. 

But he didn’t.

* * *

“Hey, Eddie! I’m so glad you called, I actually just left Bill and Audra’s and you wouldn’t believe—,” Mike spoke the moment he picked up the phone, and Eddie let him, even though he had questions to asked and was vibrating out of his skin about it, because this was Mike and if anyone was owed his friends listening to them, it was Mike. Even though Eddie was feeling anything but patient, and while, yes, he was also excited to hear about Mike’s time in California and his adventures with the ever-strengthening Denbrough-Phillips coalition, he was also kind of on a mission. 

“That’s great, Mike,” he said, when Mike finished, and he promised to himself to stop being a shitty friend (once he got his own shit figured out and maybe when he stopped being a kind of shitty person in general) and actually give Mike the attention he deserved. “Listen, I don’t know if you’ve talked to Richie but—”

“Oh, is that what this is about?” Mike asked and Eddie was taken aback. So, what, was Eddie not allowed to talk about their weird heart-to-heart (it wasn’t really a heart-to-heart, Eddie hadn’t got to have any input of his own, he only got to listen, so, really, it was more of a heart-to-ear) but Richie could spill his guts about it to everyone else? What the fuck? How was that fair? 

“Did,” Eddie stuttered, “did he talk to about, um, this?” Eddie heard Mike chuckle and didn’t know whether or not that was a positive sign.  
“No, not exactly,” he said. “But he’s been, well, bitchy, lately, so I kind of figured something was up.”

“And you knew it had to do with me?”

“It’s a certain kind of bitchy he gets. And he'd just, um, been with you, so, um.” Mike trailed off.

“Shit. I’m sorry to bother you with this, Mike, but, you know. I don’t really know where I stand on this and I knew everyone else would just probably automatically take his side. Except you, and maybe Ben. But you know Ben, he’s never found a fence he wouldn’t ride.”

“Right,” Mike said, slow. “And you think I’ll…?”

“Hear me out? At least? And let me be vague about it?” Eddie tried, and he heard Mike laugh again. 

“Yeah, alright. Go for it.” Eddie took a breath.

“Okay, well. Um. Richie told me something. Something, uh, big? And it had to do with me. Very much had to do with me. In regards to, um, him. And so, he told me this, and then said we couldn’t talk about it. And now I haven’t heard from him in a week, and,” Eddie sighed, “I think I really want to talk about it.”

“Mhm. Have you tried calling him?”

“I don’t know if he wants to hear from me.”

“Eddie. I don’t know what he told you,” Mike said, like he knew for sure what Richie had told him, “but I can’t tell you what to do next. Because I don’t know. That’s on you. But I’m here for the both of you, whatever goes down, alright?”

“Alright. Thank you, Mike,” Eddie said, sincere but sorry over it, and suddenly aware that if anything in his life was going to change, he’d have to be proactive in it.

* * *

Eddie wasn’t thriving but he was alive and he was making choices, which was all he could ask for, really.

He went to his therapy appointment that next week and actually used his therapist as a therapist and spilled on the events of his last few weeks, letting Grant into everything Eddie had decided hadn’t been worth talking about until that point. About leaving his wife, about fleeing to Georgia, and about Richie. All about Richie. More and more of years and years of Richie flew out of him from his seat on Grant’s office couch, like he just couldn’t help himself, as stories from childhood to the end of his time at Derry Township High, to the last several months of his life where he got to have him back. Grant listened and took his notes on his little notepad and asked Eddie questions he didn’t know how to answer. 

“Have you considered,” Grand asked him, “that you may return his feelings?” 

Had Eddie considered it? Oh, oh, had Eddie considered it?

Of course he’d considered it.

He’d considered a lot of things recently, good and bad and overwhelmingly in-between. And not-so-recently, too, if the memories that kept flowing back to him were anything to go by, which he supposed they were.

“God, I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m just—I just left my wife on a fucking _whim_ , I don’t know if trust myself to know what I’m, uh, feeling.” Eddie’s head ached. “I loved her, I swear I did, or thought I did, or wanted to or—I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.” Grant nodded at him.

“That’s understandable. You have to give yourself time to work this all out. It’s not even been a month, you have plenty of time to sort through how you feel.”

“You don’t know that, though, is the thing. Me, or Myra, or, or Richie, or anyone else, we could die whenever. Out of nowhere. Stan did. I did.” Eddie coughed. “I really did die, three whole times and I don’t know why it didn’t stick but it didn’t. And then what? I go home and try to make things work the way they were, because why wouldn’t I? I don’t get to just—just wake up one day and decide ‘oh, fuck all this’ and upend my whole fucking life, I don’t get to do that.” He gestured with his arms, stiff. “Just because I almost died? Just because I felt a little disappointed in my life? It’s not fair for me to do that. It’s a really pretty thought, but it’s just not realistic. It’s all just—it’s too late.” Eddie coughed again, a pathetic excuse for a sob lodged in his throat making it hard to go on. Grant hummed.

“I see.” He set down his notebook. “And what exactly makes you think that? That it’s too late?”

“It just is. Like, I’m forty-one, man. It’s a lot. Too much.”

“Then don’t make it too much,” Grant said, like it could really be so simple. “I’m not advising you to, to throw away your whole right now and jump into the unknown. But take some steps. You’ve already been taking them. Leaving your unhappy marriage, reconnecting with friends. There’s no reason not to take some more. You have to let go of what you used to want, or thought you used to want. Try things out, see what makes you happy _now_. You have time.”

“But—”

“And even if it turns out you don’t have time, that’s no reason not to try. You can’t know the future, Eddie, but you can start deciding what you want from it now.”

* * *

He’d planned to call Richie that night. Then the next morning, he’d decided would be a good time to call, until he remembered the time difference and decided it’d be best to put off until the weekend. Or that Monday. Or after that, even.

After three weeks of radio silence, Eddie had finally gathered the gumption to talk to Richie.

Then the bastard called him first. He was in New York. Actually for work this time, he had said, but he’d flown in early because he needed to drop by. 

Patty had sent photos. Copies of them, anyway. To Richie.

“Since you didn’t have a physical address, I thought I could, y’know,” Richie had said and Eddie agreed with him. Richie laughed when Eddie gave his hotel address, planned to swing by when Eddie got off work, and parted with a quick “see you later, Ed-louise.” It was a stupid joke, but Eddie couldn’t have been happier to hear it.

He couldn’t have been less happy to have to go to work, but he couldn’t call in and skip out, he’d been pushing it lately and had already more than drawn attention to himself with his one-two combo of piss-poor effort and attitude. Maybe he could quit, there wasn’t anything stopping him from quitting. He wasn’t sure if he liked his job, and maybe that was something he was supposed to be sure about. He could just walk in, slap down his two-weeks (and then continue to show up to work for those next two weeks, making the slapping down kind of overkill but he was really on a roll here, would Grant consider this a step?) and just make them deal with that. Analyze that risk, motherfuckers. 

Eddie went to work.

He spent his time looking at apartments. 

None he liked, but it was a start.

* * *

He was prepared for the knock on the door of his hotel room, but it made him jump all the same. Eddie tried to walk casually over to it, but couldn’t, nerves getting the better of him and making him half-job across the room and fling open the door.

Richie stood there, as planned, a flat-rate envelope in his hand. 

“Hey,” Eddie said.

“Hey,” Richie answered. It had been less than a month since Eddie had last seen him, but it still felt almost weird to look at Richie standing in the doorway. “Could I, um, come in?” he asked, and Eddie stepped out of the way to let him into the room. Richie turned to Eddie, gesturing with the envelope. “Where?”

“Oh, um,” Eddie stumbled, pissed at the both of them for how uncomfortable this felt. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. It wasn’t how they were supposed to work. “Anywhere?” Richie looked at him and raised a shoulder in a slight shrug, before settling down on the floor at the foot of the bed. He lifted up the envelope to peel at the seal and Eddie sat down beside him, carefully lowering himself to the ground and setting down his cane.

“You didn’t open it?” Eddie asked. Richie glanced back up at him.

“No,” he said. “Thought we should, you know.” Eddie did know.

“Right.” 

Neither spoke as Richie finished opening the seal and pulled out the stack of glossy photographs. He sat them gently on the carpeted floor and picked up the first one, a shot of Stan, not much older than Eddie last remembered him, his hair disheveled but in a neat suit just a bit too big for him. And he was smiling, soft and warm and Eddie knew then that it had been Patty behind the camera. Richie flipped it over and gasped, soft, when there was writing on the back. 

“APO formal, November 1996,” Richie read aloud. He turned the photo back over. “Look at our Stan. At a formal for a service fraternity. I bet it was at a VFW, they always are. Imagine Stan at a VFW.”

“I mean, look at the photo, we don’t have to imagine.” Richie laughed at that and Eddie felt himself calm down, just a bit. Maybe this could be okay. Maybe he could, if he would stop being such a little bitch, do anything about all of… this.

“I, um, actually,” Richie started, chuckling through his own words. “I spent my twenty-first birthday at a fraternity formal at a VFW.”

“You were in a fraternity?”  
“Not even. A, uh, friend found out I had to work late and didn’t have plans, so he picked me up after my shift and somehow got me in as his plus-one,” Richie laughed. “It was horrible. I drank so much brown tequila. And they didn’t even have limes for the shots, so we did them with lemons. I fuckin’,” Richie laughed harder, and Eddie snorted, “I fuckin’ _painted_ the bathroom stalls of that VFW men’s room, man.” 

“Oh, gross,” Eddie said, still chuckling as their laughter calmed. They looked at the photo, quiet, for a while longer before Eddie decided it was time to speak again.

“Y’know, Rich,” Eddie said. “If that guy, from the story, if he was your boyfriend, you can just call him that.” Eddie kept his eyes on the photo, but felt Richie turn to look at him. 

“Alright,” Richie said and reached for the next photo. 

It was one of Stan and Patty in the sunshine, arms around each other. This one had to be more recent, because Patty looked familiar and Stanley less so. Richie turned it over and a rush of air left his nose in an almost-laugh.

“Elwyn John Wildlife Sanctuary, 2014,” he read. They both looked content in the photo, the gentle excitement on Stan’s face was easily mirrored on Patty’s. “Guess Stan really did find someone who gives as much of a shit about birds as he does. Did. Fuck.” Richie coughed, bringing his fist to his mouth. 

“Yeah,” Eddie said, and bumped Richie’s shoulder with his own, edging just barely closer to him. 

It continued like that, them sitting in near-silence as they flipped through the photos, only speaking to read the captions Patty had so thoughtfully penned on the backs, as the comments and jokes fell away the deeper they got into the pile. It seemed that they were never going to reach the end, until they did. It seemed to have ended much too soon, then, Eddie thought.

The room was quiet after they lay down the final photograph, the only noises being Richie’s hitching breathing as Eddie listened to him try and fail not to cry. 

“I’m sorry,” Riche choked out. 

“Don’t be,” Eddie said. He didn’t know exactly what Richie was apologizing for, but he also knew there was nothing to apologize for.

“Fuck you, let me apologize.”

“Alright, Jesus, for what?”

“For not letting you talk to me about, about our conversation. It wasn’t fair.” Richie rubbed at his eyes, sighing. “It’s just, it’s been fucking hard, after Derry. You know that. Losing Stan and almost you and then—everyone else was alive and fine and that wasn’t good enough for me. And then you were safe, at least. And I wanted more than that and that wasn’t fair. Of me. To drop that on you. So there.” 

“Can we talk about it?” Eddie asked, after a moment.

“If we have to.”

“I really missed you. I always do, but these last few weeks have really sucked. I don’t know how I managed twenty-plus years without your annoying voice, amnesia or not, because,” Eddie trailed off, he knew where he was going, almost, but the path was foggy. Hard to maneuver, but still tried.

“Because?” Richie asked, voice still wet, and Eddie wanted it to stop being like that. Seeing Richie sad was wrong, it didn’t fit his face in a way that made sense and Eddie hated to look at it. He hated even more that he was, in any way, the cause of it. 

“Fuck, Richie, I’m not good at, at saying shit.” And he wasn’t. His emotions were heavy, cumbersome but stringy and sticky. They were hard to articulate on the best days, in the most obvious of situations, and even then they tended to get bogged down in hideous hybrids of metaphor and simile, misremembered idioms. 

“Then say your shit, Eds.”

“I love you,” Eddie said, almost adding “I think,” but thinking (no, not thinking, but _knowing_ , because the moment he said it he was suddenly sure that he _knew_ ) better of it. “Too,” he continued, as if the elaboration was necessary. “I love you too.”

There was no immediate response and Eddie’s heart began to race, suddenly terrified that he had somehow misread every interaction he’d ever had with Richie, until he heard a (still wet) chuckle from beside him.

“You gonna add ‘man’ to that?” Richie asked, and Eddie pushed him.

“No. I love you. Fuck you.” Richie looked at him then, tracks glistening from where unchecked tears had run down his face. His cheeks were red and eyes puffy, his glasses were smudged, and Eddie really felt it then, let himself feel it then. He loved this man, runny nose and sweaty forehead all included. Eddie reached up with his hands to thumb away Richie’s tears, and Richie started back up crying. Eddie started to tear up in response,

“No, no,” Eddie warned. “Knock that shit off or I’m gonna start crying too. We can’t both cry, it’ll never stop.”

“Come on, it’s,” Richie sniffled, “it’s bonding. It’s a tear based connection or,” he sniffled again, “something.” Eddie leaned back, willing the tears back into his eyes and Richie laughed at him. Richie wiped at his nose with his arm and, for whatever reason, Eddie still loved him for it.

“You’re so gross,” Eddie said. “Stop crying.”

“I can’t,” Richie said. “You’ll have to make me.” Eddie frowned at him.

“Is that really how you want to ask me to kiss you?”

“I literally do not have all day, Eds, get on it.”

Eddie rolled his eyes and leaned in.

* * *

Eddie died.

Eddie died three times. 

It didn’t stick.

Eddie knew he’d die a fourth time, someday. But he didn’t like to think about that if he didn’t have to. So he didn’t. Most of the time. No one’s perfect at ignoring the horrifying inevitability of death, but he fucking tries.

The six months after his and Richie’s “little reunion” passed in a blur of apartment, and lawyer phone calls, and plane tickets, and workshopping new comedy bits. And, of course, sporadic tears. But healing was what it was, and what it was was time-consuming and long-winded, so it was a process. They were working on it. 

He hadn’t quit his job, but he worked remotely more often than not. 

The cane had become a perfectly regular part of his life.

He reached out to all of his friends, the six of them actively planning a big reunion get-together. 

He actually talked to his therapist, and, every now and again, actually took his advice to heart.

And just like that, it had been a year since Derry. A year since what set in motion both the worst and best parts of his life. It wasn’t funny, how that worked, but you could laugh if you looked at it the right way. 

* * *

There was an envelope on the kitchen island of Eddie’s new apartment. Richie liked to call it _their_ apartment even though he was only there every other week and his name was not on the contract (Eddie liked to call it _their_ apartment too). Eddie stood in front of it, cup of coffee in one hand (some sort of overpriced cinnamon blend Richie had brought back from Chicago, oatmilk, one splenda), the other gripping the edge of the counter. Eddie was still staring out of it when Richie strolled out of the bedroom (soft and groggy and just a bit stiff-walking from their late night reunion when Richie finally made it back _home_ from LA) and came up behind him to kiss Eddie on the cheek. 

“Staring contest with the mail?” Richie asked, and Eddie gestured to the specific piece with his head.

“Oh,” Richie said, reaching out to pick up the envelope, neat and white and altogether unassuming aside from its return address. Patricia Blum Uris. Patty hadn’t spoken to them since she sent the pictures all those months ago, and they hadn’t tried to reach out. She’d already done more for them than either Richie or Eddie thought they deserved and they’d decided they would leave her alone. But now.

Richie continued to just stare at the envelope in his hand, so Eddie grabbed it and slipped his thumb under the seal to slowly rip it open. He pulled out the thin sheet of notebook paper that was inside.

> _Hello,_
> 
> _I’m not sure you thought you’d hear from me again. Honestly, I’m not sure I thought you’d hear from me again. But here you are, hearing from me again._
> 
> _I don’t know what any of us were thinking, in February. Grief is weird and different for everyone, I think. Manifests in all sorts of ways, maybe even especially in ways we can’t understand. I don’t know why you came to see me, and I don’t know if I’m glad you did. But I am glad I got to meet you._
> 
> _I hope you are doing okay. I can’t say I am, just yet, but I think I might be getting there._
> 
> _I found another photo I thought you’d want a copy of. I found it in the pages of one of Stanley’s old guidebooks, like a bookmark. The page was for mourning doves. A poetic coincidence, if not a little on-the-nose. You know Stanley, he’s always prefered to be straightforward._
> 
> _I think this one might look a little more like your Stanley._
> 
> _Patty._

In the envelope, behind the paper was a single wallet sized photograph of a young Stan, hair lighter than any of other photos Patty had sent them, his smile tight, visibly uncomfortable in his suit. 

“Oh,” Richie said as he picked it up and flipped it over. “Knew it. Stanley Uris bar mitzvah, 1989. Look at him, just a baby. Yeesh. I went to his bar mitzvah. Amazing shitshow.” He handed the photo to Eddie, who examined it close, as if he could commit the entire image to memory if he looked strongly enough at it. 

“We should show the others,” Eddie said, tucking both the photo and letter back into the envelope. “I think they’d want to see it. Bring them to the party, maybe?”

“Right. He should be there.”

Eddie set the letter back on the counter and wrapped his arms around Richie, to the point of almost aching.

The thing they don’t tell you about near death experiences is that you make a lot of promises. A lot of promises made directly to yourself that are incredibly difficult to keep (you are, after all, both your best critic and your worst enabler). 

But what you should already know about near death experiences is that you survive them. You get to keep living. After all the blood has been wiped away, and the tears wiped away, and the path ahead unblocked, you get to forge on the best you can. 

The path is hard. After all, what isn’t? You’re used to being told what to do, where to go and when. There’s none of that here. You have to move yourself forward, learn, and grow, and love, pushing past the potential ends. If, of course, that’s what you want.

It’s what you want.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: i'll write a fic where stan is dead but ONLY if i get to make him still a major character
> 
> thank you so much for reading this and for your patience as i finished it, it's been, uh. longer than planned. whoops, but hey so it goes or whatever
> 
> here's hoping i eventually write something where the rest of the losers aren't appearing almost exclusively via phone call
> 
> (i may or may not be editing bits and pieces of this last part over time, who knows)


End file.
